I-love-chants....I-love-chants....I-love-chants....I.....

Yes, I LOVE chants! I make anything a chant. I wave my hands up and down with the rhythm of the chants. My kids at church know me and know how I love chants. They also know that sometimes I wait to proceed with whatever we are doing until all of them are chanting with me. Just picture this little example with me...50 kids at children's camp waiting to eat lunch when Miss Trinity comes out with a letter for one of the kids from home. What do we do? We chant. Open it....open it....open it.... and we keep chanting until everyone is chanting and then the person opens the mail. That is just one example. My kids, my church kids that is, pretty much know, and I don't have to get very far in the chant before I have a whole bunch of little voices chanting with me.....music to my ears!
My other chanting buddies.....my sister Bethany and my friend Emily. We all three LOVE to chant. I must say that Emily has come a LONG ways in her chanting abilities. Used to, she made up the craziest, non rhyming chants with no rhythm at all, however, her chants were very funny and we all got lots of laughs from them! They have come a long ways, and now she makes up great chants, most of the time. When we were getting ready for VBS, she was thinking of ways to decorate her room. She decided she would get some boxes and "make it like a horse, then paint it like a cow." Random I know. But it made a great chant and it will still pop up into my head and I will chant.... make it like a horse, paint it like a cow........make it like a horse, paint it like a cow...... Yes I do. I know that this is probably a little too far into my brain than most of you wanted to go, but I really do like chants. They really make me happy.
Saying all of this, you know my girls love chanting. We chant all of the time, and even though you probably wouldn't guess it, Autumn likes chanting too. I know she sure doesn't come across as the chanting type, but she is a really fun chanter, let me tell you. We chant at pretty much anything. We might be driving down the road, for example, and one of the girls says, "I want a drink." (That is a very whiny voice when she says I want a drink). So instead of trying to deal with the whiny girl, we just might chant, I want a drink......I want a drink.......I want a drink....... Most of the time, by the time we get done chanting, everyone is happier (because chanting does that to you) and the whininess (made up the word) is gone for the moment. That is one of the MANY times we chant. I'm sure you can all imagine some other scenarios, and I just don't want to torture you to have to read about all of the times we chant.
But...................
You do need to know about a particular chant. A was in pre-k, and we got a "yellow slip" in her folder. She moved her car that day from green to yellow. Going from green to yellow is not good. It means you did something wrong and got in trouble. Now, this wasn't the first yellow slip of the year, but if I remember right, she had been doing really good, so we were a little frustrated/disappointed to get a yellow slip. The front of the slip had the check mark by "not following directions". Well, that is very broad. Sometimes that is all that is on those slips, so then we have to go through the long process of trying to figure out exactly what happened and why did they not follow directions. Sometimes, that long process ends in calling the teacher to get the whole story. This time, however, on the back of the slip, the teacher had written something like this: A, along with several others were chanting "We want pizza" in line at the cafeteria.
Oh man, I have to admit, that I just started CRACKING up! I couldn't help it. I couldn't hold back the laughter until I wasn't around her. Nope, I just laughed really hard right there in front of her, with her big brown eyes and wrinkled eyebrows looking up at me a little confused. I could just imagine in my head all of these little kids lined up, waving their hands up and down, and chanting we want pizza at the top of their lungs. No, I couldn't hold in the laughter. So we asked her what happened. Well, the cafeteria usually had pizza on every Wednesday. But they changed the menu unexpectedly, so the kids came to school thinking it was pizza day, and they didn't get pizza. From everything we can tell, A did not start the chant and honestly, she doesn't even like pizza that much. BUT, the girl will join in any chant. Poor girl....she was very confused at why we chant at home but get in trouble at school......oops...I guess we shouldn't chant that much.
Needless to say, we had a talk that day about how shouting "we want pizza" might have hurt the cooks' feelings and that while chanting is VERY fun, you just have to chant in the appropriate times (which I needed that lesson too). But, we just had to test her and see if she would join in another chant. We started chanting things that didn't make sense like "I like dirt.....I like dirt.....I like dirt" I guess it is going to take a little more than just one talk about not joining in any chant, cause she joined right in right away!