Tweaking

Another day of tweaking the Christmas Program.  I almost forgot to send the bulletin insides to the church secretary today (like I told her I would).  I'm getting to the scatterbrained stage of Christmas program preparation!

We have almost all of our props accounted for and in position at church.  Miss S and I ironed out the bell/tone chime location situation.  Our solution is to play all the songs on hand bells and have the music in the books just so, so we don't have to have tables put up for tone chimes.  Miss S taught them how to mart and use mallets; practice went well today! We still have a lot of work to do, but there are four practices left.  We can do it!

Our speakers were more confident today and knew the places where they should be and when.  We shaved about 15 minutes off our total program time today! I know we'll be even faster tomorrow now that I've tweaked mostly everything.

I do have one more change to add tomorrow... The shepherds don't do much acting this year, and I feel kind of bad about that since we have a Bible school kid who is coming to two of our practices so he can be a shepherd.  The 3rd and 4th graders' speaking part is the area where shepherds would normally be doing their acting.  The other speaking part that talks about shepherds already has so many people center stage, it would be too crazy to squeeze a bunch of shepherds up there too.  So my brilliant plan is to have the shepherds do some acting during our song "Run Shepherds Run."  The words of the song are perfect for it!  They'll look around like, "oh, hey, we should go check that baby out!" and then they'll scurry up the side aisle and down the center aisle, gathering around baby Jesus in the manger.  It will be adorable. I'm so excited for practice tomorrow!

While our speaking parts are coming together, the songs almost seem to be getting worse... the two middle songs are solid, but the beginning and ending songs were kind of a mess today.  Our piano player teaches at another school, so she's only with us for one practice before the service.  To help with the transition, we recorded her playing those two songs on the piano so we could "practice" with her playing.  But the recording is waaaay slower than the kids are used to, and they kind of steamrolled all over those songs.  It was hard to hear because we were playing it off Mrs. E's phone held up to a microphone.  Tomorrow we're going to try plugging the phone into the speakers (we didn't have the necessary cord today).

To end on a positive note, we have just the right amount of microphones now!  Mr. D found a cord and another microphone, so we plugged it in and have it in a stand, leaving a cordless mic and a headset for our two main speakers!  Nice!