She was quite sleepy, but N contained her restlessness quite well through M’s spring choral concert yesterday afternoon, and required minimal distractions: pretzels to eat out of my hat and colored pencils and a notepad.
Once she’d adjusted to making comments in a small whisper (“That lady’s throat jiggles when she sings!”), she listened quite well to the choral selections but especially well to the orchestral component, Vivaldi’s “Spring.”
While I listened, it occurred to me that I should personally thank the one person I knew on the program’s list of donors to the choir for fostering such a great fine arts environment for my child.
I didn’t cross paths with that person there, however, and after M changed back into her street clothes, we stopped by McDonald’s for a surprise end-of-choral-term celebratory snack (I was craving burgers), and drove home through the rain.
In the car M asked N what had been her favorite part of the performance.
“I liked coloring,” she said.
(Later M told me the rest of the story: The day before, she’d taken N to an “instrument petting zoo” at a nearby university, then to Dollar General. That night in bed, she asked N about her favorite part of the outing: “All the interesting things at the store,” she said.)