Recitals aplenty!

This was a week of music performance: 4 events to attend, 5 people in our family performing.

First was James' piano recital, which I blogged about previously. Yay, James!

Then came Alice's school Winter Arts Festival. Also documented in detail previously. Way to go, Alice!

And then, on Saturday, we attended Alice and Robert's piano recital. Bobby recorded their performances (see below), but the kids requested that we not move over to get them in the shot. They like hiding behind a big piano.

Alice's Ring Silver Bells (with Matthew's heavy breathing):

Robert's Jingle Bell Rock (with Matthew's swaying to the beat):

I would have enjoyed the recital much more if I weren't totally stressing out about another recital happening right after this one. Erin and I have been taking guitar lessons together and we decided to perform in the winter recital. Agh! It's the craziest thing preparing for something like that again. I remember them as a child. I remember preparing myself for other public performances, too, like talks/speeches and lessons at church and Cub Scouts and such. But somehow, this felt different. I was totally psyching myself out!

In fact, in the last few minutes before our recital, Erin and I were running through our performance pieces and I literally hit every note wrong. Like I was making stuff up on the spot. Dude. Not a comforting feeling at that point. *SIGH*

We did it, though, and I'm glad we did. I felt like our performance was actually pretty good. Not my favorite run-through ever, but decent. Passing. Not hideously embarrassing :) The video Bobby took of our performance, though, is really, really quiet and hard to hear. We weren't playing very loud, for one, and the acoustic guitar isn't exactly a bold, blaring sound. That's okay. A mutual friend of ours, Aubrey, attended with her husband and took a couple snapshots.

Here we are intensely focused on the music:

And here we are intensely relieved that the first piece is over, and worried about the next piece which is significantly more difficult and troublesome...so. much. tension!:

Coming up this week, we'll have Matthew's preschool Christmas Program. After that, Bobby will have to come up with some sort of public performance something so we have a complete set ;)