Spring Break: the right time to form a girl band

It's spring break week here.  This sounds awesome, yet a realistic assessment of "spring break" reveals that it's still sub-thirty degrees, my husband is traveling, I'm flying solo with the kids, and I have a stack of essays to grade in the evenings before classes resume next week.  The key change of pace is that I'm not reporting to campus to teach at 8:00 in the morning.

So, you might ask, what am I doing at 8:00 in the morning?  Unfortunately, I'm not sleeping.  To tweak an epic line: A day may come when my children sleep past 7:00, but it is not this day.

Even so, I've been using my early hours to make breakfasts, fit in some workouts, and strategize how the rest of our days will unfold.  My goal is to do something special each day with the girls.  For example, I may have capitulated to their request to have a three-day Barbie movie marathon where we watch a different Barbie DVD each evening.  We might have baked cookies and made milkshakes on the same day just because we could.

The girls maybe decided to scrounge the house for make-shift drum sticks and create a band in which each member is a drummer.  (Because, obviously, you need three drummers in every band.)

And I might have created a music video to document it.



Going into this, I hadn't known that despite being novice drummers, they'd have remarkable stamina.  (This particular jam session lasted for nearly 20 minutes.)  What I should have known going into this is that the girls prefer performing for a live audience, which leads me to three rules of thumb:

One, when you're the only other person in the house, it guarantees that you'll become the DLAM (Designated Live Audience Member).

Two, you'll be seated next to stuffed animals. Get comfortable.

Three, at some point in the performance -- despite the fact that the entire concert has pounded at the same painfully-throbbing tempo -- your children will be certain that you missed an exceptional riff.  Not wanting to disappoint, they'll back up to repeat it.

I'm entirely serious about those two Tylenol.