Singing Practice

I'm still muddling through my practicing in these early days of the school year.  (And what does it say about my practice that already I'm counting down the weeks of the semester--when we're only on week two?)  But I am still trying to attend to incarnation.  To what it means to be a body.  And what it means to live gracefully as a body.

One of our bedtime routines, along with the almost-endless George the Monkey stories, recently joined by "Ham and Eggs," the Dr. Seuss classic Jo has renamed, has become a set of songs.  I can't recall when I started singing "Children of the Heavenly Father" to her, but it has been nearly a year now, I suppose.  One night, I mixed things up by adding the more contemporary "Let It Be Said of Us," which has stuck as "The Cross Song" in her lexicon.  In late summer, I added a few other rotating hymns, including "This Is My Father's World," "Have No Fear Little Flock," and "All Who Hunger, Gather Gladly."

As we moved into September, I wanted to add a few new ones to the rotation, so I pulled a hymnal off my shelf at school and moved it to the dresser near her rocking chair.  After a few nights of "My Life Flows on in Endless Song," she realized that the new book was a songbook.  And so she has decided to choose her own.

I'm a terrible sight-singer, but I have a strong foundation in hymnody and a great love for the singability of most hymns.  There's a pretty good bet that I can sing something on one of the pages she flips to.

Tonight, she landed in the Trinity section, so we sang "Come Join the Dance of Trinity" and "Holy, Holy, Holy."

It's good for me to practice, even with a tired and cracking voice, the sound of my own singing, the sound of singing while my child rests her head on my chest.