The two boys had their Christmas program this past Tuesday and it was the second year the Jansma family attended.  The program consisted of children varying in age from 4 years old to 5th grade and started out, as it did the year before, with the fifth grade orchestra and band preforming 25 second parts of various songs.  First of all, the orchestra was three times larger than the band while at the same time had three times more potential to create audible terrorism.  Violins, Cello’s, and various other instruments with strings that require bows to play all seemed to be incapable of being in tune.  To their credit, they had only two months of practicing to get to the point they were at, and their awfulness was acknowledged by the fact that they didn’t play anywhere close to an entire song.  While the band consisted of much more mainstream practical and fun instruments such as the saxophone and the trumpet, their performance may have been even worse.  The last song they played was indiscernible and I had no idea if it was Joy to the World or Grampa got ran over by a reindeer that they were actually trying to play.  However, the entire time they were playing “Make it stop, Make it stop, Make it stop Please” to the tune of jingle bells was going through my head.

In between the band performance and the actual Christmas play various children played pieces on the grand piano with varying degrees of success.  My oldest is taking piano lessons, while there is little chance he will last beyond the winter in his pursuit of becoming a pianist (he practices an average of 3 minutes a week and is no where near the prodigy that wold allow him to put so little effort into something to be good at it) I can’t imagine hm performing a piece in front of the entire school and an audience of parents.

The problem with the Christmas story is that you can’t really vary it up a whole lot, there’s Jesus, Mary, Joseph, shepherds and wisemen.  Every year the same basic story is portrayed and there is little that can be done to change things up to make it interesting to those who are repeat attendees.  This year there was an effort to incorporate the animals that were allegedly present in the manger when baby Jesus was born.  There was one particular animal that stood out form the rest, a rooster, it stood in the background as shepherds, wisemen, and angels said their various lines (or forgot them) into the microphones at the front of the stage.  It was like having the clown from Stephen King’s IT incorporated into the play.  Pretty sure a homicidal chicken wasn’t in any of the gospels.  There were eleven songs sang during the play (I counted them in the program before it started) along with speaking parts between every song.  This seemed to me to be a bit ambitious considering there were a flock of four and five year olds on the stage along with fifth graders who had been through this thing for 6 or 7 years straight, and looked to be suicidal by the time the play commenced.  I kept a steady eye on my kids for most of the play and they looked to be actually singing the songs about 3 % of the time.  When we got home I asked my youngest how the program was and he first said “good” but then decided to be forthright “boring, it was really boring”. I agreed with him and gave him my condolences since he still has 6 more years of the program to look forward to.  At some point I will have to discuss the importance of doing everything in his power not to land a speaking part in the play.

My mom rode with me on the way home and I made the mistake of discussing some parenting inconsistencies at the Jansma household.  Likely an epic mistake since my mom has not once, but twice tried to get me to read parenting books.  She obviously doesn’t understand that I read for entertainment purposes not so that I can be good at stuff, especially parenting.  The primary inconsistency, at least in my mind, is that I try to follow through on my threats at lest 20 percent of the time and Shirley, if making threats, forgets about her threats when it’s time to make the kids pay the piper.  The biggest issue we are facing currently is the kids desire to sleep on the floor next to us.  Sounds strange doesn’t it?  We don’t live in a third world country where the entire family sleeps together in their one room house on the floor, no we all have beds.  However, the kids have decided that they need to come and sleep on the floor next to Shirley’s side of the bed where she has created a mini bed for them with a comforter and pillows (enabling is one word for it, refusing to cut the cord would be an applicable phrase). Some nights they sneak in like ninjas and we just wake up and they are there and other nights they walk in our room and wake me up, causing me to routinely think I am in the movie the Sixth Sense where dead kids repeatedly popped up just about everywhere.  I have routinely questioned them as to why they want to sleep on the floor as opposed to their bed and their claim is that the floor is more comfortable than their bed.

Unfortunately for my kids, my mom gave me a nice little pep talk on the way home (while judging me as a parent the entire time) and I was ready to do some hard core parenting when I got home.  “did you or your siblings ever come in to our room and sleep in our bed when you were growing up?”  My response should have been no because we didn’t really like you guys, but I just said “no”.   I informed the kids when I got home that if they came into our room that night there would be no TV and no watching things on our phone the following day.  Instead of saying Ok dad,  they immediately started crying as if I told them they would have to participate in the Christmas program every day for the entire week.  Shirley stepped in and indicated that it was too late in the evening to spring such troubling news upon our little angels and began to console them.  Sure enough, that night the kids came into our room and slept on the floor.  When they got up they wanted to watch my phone while they ate breakfast and I told them no way.  I went on to say that they were not watching tv when they got home that evening.  They cried and carried on for roughly five minutes and then they were over it.

Typically they have my phone in the car and watch Scooby Doo, Wildcrats, or something else on PBS kids.  My oldest always asks me if I can put my phone on You Tube (blue tooth) when we get in the truck.  Guess what, with out the phone, I had to actually engage my children and we had a great ride into school.   Shirley created a character this summer named Chucky Chuckerson and the kids always want me to tell them Chucky Chuckerson stories where they are part of the story as a certain type of animal.  So, I crafted a story and incorporated a Megladon shark (not even sure if that is a real thing) and a Great White shark into my Chucky Chuckerson story.  The story involved a Disney Cruise where the Disney characters were thrown off the ship and consumed by the two sharks named after my kids.

That evening Shirley picked up the kids form school and had dinner waiting when I arrived home.  The kids were acting quite strange as if they had something to hide from me, the reality is that Shirley should have had something to hide from me, the kids had watched TV while she made dinner.  Just like anything, choosing your battles is one of the keys to succeeding in life.  Was this a battle I wanted to to fight?  Due to the fact that sex is still a preoccupation of mine that consumes my thoughts from sun up to sun down I decided against waging war on this matter because it would have evolved into a larger conflict than anything that could transpire between the United States and North Korea.  The sad reality is that women have quite a bit of leverage due to the distinct nature of their anatomy and men’s preoccupation with those particular anatomical traits we don’t possess.  You know what has never been thought or uttered by a women “I better not broach this subject, it may put sex in the near future in serious jeopardy.”