January

On the way home from UT I finally had that skin appointment with a dermatologist that Mom, Dad, and Joanna see. She told me so far my skins ok, but I have a few spots that show "pre-cancerous" conditions, and am going to have to use a cream to kill those cells. Joy. Hey, but for all those years swimming and life guarding in the sun, at least I don't have any cancer yet.

School started off with a bang- and I had a ton of new middle school choir students signed up. I'm up to about 80 students in the middle school. (Wish more of them were boys. . .but that's always the middle school struggle.) I do have enough boys to do our first all-boy song by the middle school. They're pretty excited about that. A lot of the songs we're working on right now are pretty popular, radio friendly tunes because I felt after Christmas they needed a big pick me up. For some reason a lot of the Christmas numbers this year were very slow and serious. I must have been in a very serious mood when I chose them:) So I seem to be trying to make up for that now. The kids appreciate it.

Yesterday I took my high schoolers to U of A for Regional Auditions. I have about 45 go. I've been feeling like their focus lately and their sight reading abilities have been lacking, so I was very surprised when 16 of my students made it! I feel like that's quite an accomplishment. To me this is kind of like my bench marks, and I don't want to see my numbers go down. I was a little worried about three of the girls behavior on the trip, but as far as I know, everything was peechy keen, and nobody got into any trouble. These trips are tough because they're pretty much on their own all day. I'm weird and I like to accompany all my students in the audition. (Other directors think I'm crazy). The bad part about the day was I had to leave on the early bus at 6, and didn't come home on the late bus till 7:00. We had to work transportation around orchestra and band as well. My day was pretty much shot. When the choir kids met up with me at U of A about 10 of them were extremely sick, coughing, sneezing, running temperatures, and they all looked like they wanted to kill me. (I make this trip mandatory and it's VERY hard for them to get out of going without major consequences.) I also caught some kind of fever, achy stuff by the end of the day. I seriously need to make Emergen-C and Air Born a permanent part of my day! I tell you, when someone gets something in our choir, it runs through everybody like wildfire. Kodee's also been pretty sick at home too. Nancy said it seems like someone's always sick at our house. . .wish that weren't so.

Forgot to mention every single one of the 9 orchestra kids made it and 10 of the 12 Safford band kids made it. Id' definitely say things are looking up in the Safford music department. Now I just have to get this tour to Hollywood underway and over with, along with a NAU Jazz/Madrigal festival, Regional's Festival, All-State Audition, directing the Arizona Jr. High All-State Choir, EAC Large Group festival, All-State Music Festival, a late winter and late spring concert for both Jr. High and High School, then Ariana having her baby- can you see why these next few months are a bit daunting? Not to mention daily voice lessons I teach after school from 3:30 to 6:00. I'm a CRAZY man! But I love it. . .sometimes! Oh yeah, I also had 7 other voice students not from Safford that made Regionals too. Glad I could prepare them for it.

Ari of course is at home chasing these boys around. They really seem to be feeding off of each other lately. One on one they are definitely manageable, but together- pure havoc. They love swords, and will turn anything into them- especially Ari's butter knifes. The other day they were running around with plastic hangers pretending to shoot arrows at people. They're other favorite thing to do is to run from one end of the house to the other as fast as they can go (Kodee almost always runs into something). Jaxon discovered crawling up my legs and doing a backflip while holding my hands this week. He wants to do it all the time. Kodee tried, but is not quite there yet. Kodee will not stay in his crib any more, and is averaging climbing out of it about 9 times a night. . .joy! Sounds a lot like me when i was little, eh dad? Probably time to think about bunk beds.

A weight has been lifted this week. I finally told our landlord our plans to move in the summer to mom and dad's when Jenny and Richard get into their house. He seemed pretty sad to be losing us. I don't blame him :) We're definitely excited to get out of this house though.

Ari was overjoyed when she had her ultra-sound this Friday and could see female body parts clear as day! Now she KNOWS and is ready for sugar and spice in the house. Up until now they've always just told us. . ."well, we don't see anything to indicate the baby's a boy." Now she's ready for a girly baby shower. Pregnancy looks beautiful on her and everyone says she has such a cute prego belly. Our neighbor, Janine, has been a guardian angel for her and I'm SO grateful for all she's been doing. Ari's also been walking a lot, and it's done wonders for her mentally and physically!