Getting Everyone Up To Date

OK, I admit that I haven't been the best at keeping up my blog lately. I have been quite busy baby-sitting and such. Anna Kate is no longer staying with us, so I should have some spare time now. We will see how that works out though.

There has been a lot going on. We are getting ready to start discipleship training on Sunday nights at church. Daniel is going to be teaching a financial class by Crown Ministries. I am going to be leading the children's choirs. This should be interesting. I have no experience working with children's choirs, so I am just praying that God would give me the resources that I need and the grace to pull this off. We don't have a permanent music minister right now, so I don't have someone like that to go to for advice. I am pretty much on my own. I do have some good helpers though. For Christmas we are just going to do a very simple Christmas musical. The 3-5 year olds will sing a few Christmas carols at the beginning. Who knows, maybe one day I will be inspired to write some children's music.

As you have probably noticed, I have been inspired to write some lullabies lately. Hmmm, I wonder where that inspiration came from? Sometimes Taylor's books will give me a jumping off point. I have always wanted some lullabies to sing to Taylor at bedtime, but I didn't know any, so I just started making them up. It kinda came pretty naturally. I am in the process of having a friend of mine arrange one of my songs for me. If he has time, I may have him work on the others too. My goal is to one day record all of the songs on a cd for Taylor. I also have some other ideas for how I want to use them.

Daniel got me a keyboard for our anniversary and I downloaded a program called Finale off the internet that allows you to type out your music and print it. The version I got is supposed to allow you to scan in music and edit it. So far I have had trouble getting the program to recognize the scans though. Sometimes the music ends up all jumbled up or the notes are all in the wrong places. I am still working on it though. Daniel wanted me to be able to record my songs into the program to create sheet music. I think you are supposed to be able to create MP3's too. When I get my songs arranged with accompaniment I will post them on my blog.

Taylor has been making some progress over the last month in her speaking. She has started saying baby and ball while doing the signs. She also says all gone when she is done eating. She is saying bye-bye a lot more clearly too. I can't remember if I mentioned her animal sounds or not, but her favorite is the tiger. She does that one everytime she sees a picture of a tiger. She can also moo. At one time she said quack, but I have had a hard time getting her to say it lately. She has a book of nursery rhymes that starts off with Baa, Baa, Black Sheep and it sounds like she is trying to quote it while she looks at the pictures. The only thing understandable, of course, is baa.

Taylor is also starting to show more interest in her shape sorter. I have been a little concerned because she has not mastered it yet and she gives up really easily. I have been meaning to talk to her therapist about that, but she hasn't seen her in two weeks. Hopefully she will see her tomorrow.

I am sure that there is something else that I am forgetting to blog about. Maybe now that things are a little bit quieter around here I will have some more time to blog and won't get so far behind. (Yeah right! That's what I always say about scrapbooking!)