Thursday, September 30, 2010

The Road Less Traveled

Special kudos to Levi for memorizing a pretty long poem! A good message for all of us to consider:

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Mid-Autum Festival Fun

We had a great time last night at UVU's Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. There were great people there and we loved the Chinese food ... it was all you can eat fortune cookies for the kids ... and they loved it. It was quite interesting how we got invited to come. A woman named Heidi, who has taught our kids some Chinese came over one day last Spring and brought a friend. Her friend took a 30 second video clip of Annemarie speaking in Chinese and put it on Facebook. Months later we get a call from Heidi wondering if her friend's friend (who had seen the video on Facebook) could contact us about having Annemarie sing at the UVU festival. The power of Facebook is amazing. So within a week it was all arranged. Annemarie wanted a buddy to sing with, and so Maria joined in. Both Maria and Annemarie are in Chinese immersion programs, but Annemarie is a year ahead.

Jasmine (the organizer of the festival) wanted Annemarie to sing a traditional Chinese song called Mo Li Hua. I said, "No way" thinking that it would be too complicated. But Annemarie started singing the song ... to my surprise she learned it at school last year. So she had a solo piece in front of a couple of hundred people.

Amazing!

The two videos are below, first of Annemarie and Maria singing together (along with their cousin Heidi, who is also a first-year Chinese student) and the second clip is just of Annemarie.