Self As Team

As a space junkie, I frequent nasa.gov and astronomy picture of the day sites to marvel at the universe and our attempts to learn and explore it. One of my favorite sites is the venerable Heavens Above created and run by Chris Peat. If you haven’t checked it out, please do so soon as it gives lots of very useful information for observing satellites such as space shuttles, international space station (which is large enough to be seen in the daylight hours), Hubble space telescope and hundreds of others. If you register with the site or plug in your location, you can get lists of dates/times to see things like the space station fly overhead. My kids think I’m a genius because I’ve been known to look down at my watch during dinner and announce that the ISS is about to fly overhead – we all run outside and I start a countdown and poof – right on cue – a big bright star starts a lazy, 5 minute pass overhead. All thanks to Chris Peat’s great web site. You can even get star maps and ground track paths to help you get oriented.

I sometimes forget to check the site so I setup an automatic twitter feed to send me reminders. Was very easy to do …
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I recently participated in an activity at my son’s school that I thought would be fun but it turned out to be something entirely different.

Our elementary school has a very active PTA and recently an expanding dads volunteer group (Dad’s Den). We help where we can – car pool line, ice cream socials, bounce houses, etc… The group (thanks to the encouragement and dogged work of its uber-dad organizer) wanted to expand on last year’s holiday assembly where the dad’s show up in silly hats and sing a few songs. Last year was really funny and the kids talk about it still.

Now, my wife is very involved in volunteering and supporting the schools (she’s a Lifetime PTA member) and I do what I can on my boys’ baseball, soccer and basketball teams but work often gets ‘in the way’ of doing more. This year the Dad’s Den decided to expand the holiday show by adding a band and a larger dad’s chorus. Pretty soon the ‘project’ had a life of its own with weekly rehearsals and over 70 dads. I along with three other guitarists, a keys player, two drummers, and a saxophonist soon had a few pretty silly sounding songs under our belts.

I was pretty caught up in the whole thing by week three. We were making signs, tweaking lyrics, planning how to mix keys or drums into the ‘house PA’, setting up monitor feeds – it was pretty much a zoo – and I was having a blast.
The curtain went up at 8 AM and we had a great time – the kids really got into it, lots of dad high fives, lots of laughing, the band / choir did our best. By 9:15 we had torn down the amps, drums, mixers and all headed our separate ways. Each feeling pretty good about spreading holiday cheer while having the secretly had fun playing ‘rock star’ in front of our kids.

It wasn’t until later that I was watching the video of the whole thing that it really hit me how much fun the kids had. When you are standing on stage (next to the drum set) and there are 60 dad’s standing in front of you, and you are trying to remember the chords to Jingle Bell Rock, you miss lots of what is happening. The video was shot from within the audience of 500+ elementary school kids and their joy and enthusiasm was incredible. They were singing along like sailors and fist pumping and cheering each number. It still gets me choked up thinking about how much fun they had at our expense.

Anyway, the episode rekindled in me the stuff that truly matters. Volunteering isn’t often this much fun but it is almost always as rewarding. There are lots of creative ways to get involved. I encourage each of you to take time and volunteer your time with your schools, churches, communities. You will meet some great people and you will give yourself a wonderful gift.

Happy holidays.