Singing for President Bush

Lesson learned today: when playing hang man, always use the same word twice~

After driving 10.5 hours yesterday, and getting an entirely short night of sleep, we were at the Ronald Regan house by 10 am, waiting to sing for the International Aid Summit. We waited for a few hours, and the kids entertained themselves by playing hang man and tic-tac-toe. I learned a valuable lesson from Hudson from playing hang man. He played two games in a row with me, and both times used the same word. This in fact, was quite genius, as it never in the world would have occured to me that he would use the same word twice. In final desperation, I asked him what the words were, and he in truimph, told me it was the same. Good idea i think, it fooled me!







After having coffee in a far too fancy tea cup, and lunch with the kids, they got into thier costumes to get ready for the performance. After going through security a second time, we were shoed into a holding area. The kids sang five songs, and we watched it on TV. After they sang, we watched the president of Liberia give a speech thanking Bush for his 40 some billion dollars he has given to Africa. It was special, to sit there with children who are from these poorest situations in Africa, and realizing that so many people are taking part in something so important.
After this, we were ushered into a rather dingy basement of a place, where we waited for a good 30 minutes before the president himself came for a picture. David, one of our boys, had lost a shoe somewhere in the mix, and now we were trying to place him in a position where the president would not notice his foot. For 30 minutes, we sat there, all posed and ready for our picture, just waiting for the man to show up. About 40 Secret Service people came through, Bush in the middle. He was nice, tall, as I expected him, and talked with us a bit about his family. He talked about his daughter getting married, how he cried like a baby and how beautiful she looked. Someone mentioned that we had two chaperones from Texas, so he began asking Amanda what county her ranch was in. She couldn't remember for the life of her, and afterwards I asked her if it was because she was nervous, but she said no, in fact she just couldn't remember.....


After a couple pictures, we were promised that they would send us a copy, the aunties and uncles in the back row, kids around the president. We couldn't take cameras anywhere near him, which i suppose didn't surprise me too much, but i was a bit dissapointed.

After that, we got ice cream and celebrated, and then took the kids to see the whitehouse. by this point, my feet in my boots that i just love were beginning to kill me, 7 hours in boots can do that to any person. So i asked Christine, one of our girls if we could switch shoes. She was more then happy to switch. :)
After that, we drove 6 hours back up north, heading back to finish up our church tour!