I made it!! I made it!! Yippee!! How very exciting!! I made it into the choir for the Annual Teddy Bear Christmas Carols by Candlelight event! I had to go to an audition so that Christina the Chorister, Conductress and Choir Mistress (she likes to have a fully featured job title!) could hear my singing voice. But…I will tell you a little secret. A teddy does NOT have to have a great singing voice to be a member of the choir. They just have to be willing to sing with every little bit of their heart shaped heart. Oh, I have to tell you the most funniest and interesting discovery I made the other day!! My friend Ian the ill and invalid bear needed to have an x-ray to check how his heart was pumpitty-pumping along. He had already had an ECBG, which stands for electro-cardio-bear-ography, to check his heart. But Doctor Teddy wanted to investigate a bit further, so he ordered another x-ray too.  Doctor Teddy gave Ian a red jelly bean just before the ECBG and a black jelly bean after the procedure because …well that it just what nice teddy doctors do!! Doctor Teddy has the hugest, biggest bottle completely full of all sorts of colours of jelly beans. It really is the hugest bottle of jelly beans I have ever seen! My teddy friend Charlie teddy, you may know him because he accompanied Charlie and his grandfather when they went to visit Mr. Willy Wonka, said that the Doctor's jar of jelly beans is even bigger than the ones at the Wonka Chocolate Factory!! Wow! I am sooo impressed to visit a doctor teddy bear that has a big jelly bean bottle in his room! Anyway, back to telling you about Ian and his x-ray. After he had eaten the black jelly bean, Doctor Teddy then said that he would arrange another x-ray. But… it had to be on another day, because if it was taken immediately, well the red and black of the jelly beans would show up on the x-ray pictures. That makes a lot of sense doesn't it!  I said that I would go along with Ian to the radiation x-ray department to keep him company because he was just a little bit nervous. He was a bit worried about being "zapped" by the machine. I tried to reassure him, and told him my funniest teddy jokes that I could remember. They were so funny that we both ended up laughing and laughing our heads off! Well, not literally because if our heads came off, it would be most inconvenient! We would have to walk around as headless teddies! Can you imagine us walking around holding our heads in our hands? It would be quite a strange sight! So we laughed a lot, but not too much that our teddy heads came off! Ian calmed down considerably, and was so relaxed and was laughing every time he remembered my jokes that Nola the nurse teddy had to explain to him that he really needed to stop laughing or else the x-ray pictures would turn out too blurry! That meant he had to try to think of something very, very sad. As he started to think sad thoughts, he became so very, very unhappy and ended up crying uncontrollably. The sight of him upset made me sad too, and I started crying in empathy with him. Nola the nurse came to see why we were crying, and when she saw us two teddies crying, she too started to feel very tearful and very soon the three of us were crying. And do you know what happened next? Xavier the X-ray doctor teddy came to see what happening… and he dropped a hammer on his foot! Please do NOT ask me why Xavier had a hammer in his hand because even now I do not even have a little clue as to why he was carrying a hammer in his hand… but he was! Xavier started crying from the pain, so the room was full of the four of us teddies crying! It was quite an unhappy scene.  Katie the Kleenex teddy heard us, and quickly "came to the rescue" . She grabbed a big bundle of kleenexes out of a tissue box, handed them to us and so we stopped crying to pat our eyes and were okay again to continue on with the x-ray. In fact, after a good cry we actually felt a huge amount better! Life seemed great and we were calmer. Xavier still had a BIG blueish greyish bump bruise on his foot, but the best thing was that he hadn't broken a bone. It is funny though because Xavier actually x-rayed his own foot to see if it was broken!

Anyway, Ian went and had his heart x-ray. And… finally I can tell you the most interesting thing I discovered! I know that it took me a while to get to this point, but I just had to tell you all the details leading up to me discovering it! I discovered that our heart is not "heart-shaped" at all!! It looks quite weird and oddly shaped. I discovered this when I was looking at the x-ray pictures of Ian. It tried to find his heart shaped heart, but it was nowhere to be seen. Instead a funny shaped item was pointed out to be the heart. You learn something new every day you know!!

Back to becoming a part of the bear choir. A teddy just has to sing with all their bear heart, and have a very big smile on their face. Singing makes me smile anyway, so it is not hard to do that. I am a bit curious about something though. I don't really know what sort of teddy singing voice that I have? I don't know if I am a bass or a tenor or a baritone? I do enjoy playing a piano when there is an opportunity that arises that a grand piano just happens to appear where I am, but I have never actually played a bass musical instrument, so I must not be a bass. I could be a tenor, but as you know, I don't have any money because teddies don't have any pockets to hold money, which means that I don't have "ten dollars" or a "tenor" in money. I must not be a tenor then. Hmmm…that leads to the term a "baritone". Well, if you say the word very, very quickly, it sounds like a "Britainer" and I am definitely an Aussie through and through! Mr. Oliver my teddy friend who comes from Oxford must be a baritone, but I am definitely not! Sooo… I really don't know what singing voice I have. Perhaps I could be classified as being a "tedbearitone" that reaches the high notes, the low notes and all the middle notes! I do have quite a large mouth you know! (And I am quite talkative! You probably have guessed that I am a bit chatty!)

Do you sing in the shower? I do NOT do that!! I did try that once, and it was a complete disaster! I opened up my mouth to sing... and the result was lots and lots of water invading my mouth, and I started to gulp very drastically and it was quite an unhappy experience! No, I decided right then and there, that all the singing that I do will never be done in the presence of water pouring down from a shower head nozzle!

Until next time,

                  Sing a little happy song in your heart, and let it explode into a smile onto your face!

 Your friend, Mr. Kiosk-Ted Strath

                Also simply known as "Ted"!!