Emmy's first starring role

It is tradition at our church that the youngest baby in the church is Baby Jesus in the "Birthday Party for Jesus" Christmas Pageant every year. Now, before you get illusions of grandeur, keep in mind this is mostly an impromptu performance done by the children's choirs. Sure, they rehearse their lines, but the itty bitty's in the Wesley Choir who play the angels sing one song alone and then several members of the junior choir have solos during The Friendly Beasts but mostly the whole audience is singing along with the kids. They play all the different members of the nativity and the mother and father of the "Baby Jesus" play Mary and Joseph.

As you can probably assume now, Emmy is the youngest baby at St. John, so this year she was Baby Jesus. That's right folks, we all three starred as the Holy Family. I was, as my friend Mary Ann pointed out, the Blessed Virgin Marion. Um, sure! I was extremely nervous about Emmy's acting debut for 2 reasons: it was close to bed time (and there had been an earlier and shorter than usual afternoon nap) and for goodness sake, she's 7 months old, hardly a newborn. It was a very unpredictable event.

Fortunately, Emmy was perfect! She started to get fussy right before we walked out, so I handed her to Charles because he can often get her to settle down better when she's tired, so Joseph carried Baby Jesus this time. She snuggled up with him, looked around a good bit the first few minutes, quietly "sang" through the first song, then about halfway through, she fell asleep! She was also really interested in the "animals" when they came up to do their solos, and then knelt by the manger. I caught her staring at Corey-the-cow a good bit. Watch out, Corey!

Here we are with the little Wesley choir singing their song. Note that Lucy on the far left couldn't stop looking at Emmy and grinning at the baby, Lucy on the right was clearly not happy to be up there. Something happened just before they went up to sing and it upset her. And allegedly Sam (tallest in the center) had an incident just before the performance and his halo fell in the toilet. Erika (one of the Moms/helpers) had taken him to the bathroom and she told him "Well, everyone's halo falls in the toilet sometimes," so that's our new motto.

Finally, here's the sleeping Baby Jesus.