Ari's speech fair.

We went to Ari's speech fair last night. I DREAD these. Every year they start late (last year was a half hour, last night was 25 minutes late), and have all these teacher/administrator presentations which I couldn't care less about. Then when the kids do their presentations (they have kids volunteer for solo speeches, poems etc., and the classes do something too), I always bawl because Ari doesn't seem as far along as some of them and I'm always worried about if I'm doing enough for her.
Last night was better. Ari has made so much progress the past couple of years I wasn't as insecure. She even wanted to do her own poem, and had half of it memorized, but we turned in our request too late and didn't get in. Just as an interesting side note, did you hear the general Conference talk last October where Elder Anderson told the story of the little deaf girl named Hadley? She gave a speech/poem there last night.
OK this is what I wanted to tell you. There was a little boy there, I think in the kindergarten class who was so scared that when they brought him the microphone for his part he looked the other way, and up at the ceiling --like if he pretended it wasn't there it would go away. They moved on to the next kid. Later, he told his teacher he wanted to do his part so she brought him back up. Then he froze. He was supposed to do "take me out to the ballgame". After a couple of tense seconds the audience of about 150 people --all anxious parents and family of deaf children like me, started singing the song. He sang with us for the whole song. It just made me cry (I always cry at these things though, I guess that doesn't mean much). All of us had been there, where we're trying so hard to help our child progress, move forward, learn, grow. We were all rooting for him, and he did it.

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