Aretha Franklin I am Not

Why is it that NOW, several days post-trek, I keep coming up with great family cheers? I'm almost obsessed with it. Is it perhaps because we had the lamest cheer in all of pioneer trek history? This is what I wrote to our missionary son:

In the parking lot, each family was to make up a cheer. What we lacked in creative courage, we did compensate for later out on the trail with pure pushing prowess, but still, our nervous, newly-formed family was coming up dry in the idea department. Someone suggested that maybe we could combine our pioneer name, Rees, with our actual name, Beck, and do Rees-Beck, which sounded a whole lot like “respect”, which brought to mind the 1960’s Aretha Franklin number. Rees-Beck (just a little bit), Rees-Beck (just a little bit). We thought the girls could put their hands in their apron pockets and sway back and forth singing “Rees-Beck” and then the boys could kind of shimmy their suspenders with the “just a little bit”. As bad as that already was, unfortunately, Lyle kind of fixated on the pocket and suspender idea and decided that maybe before we start the song we should preface it with the girls saying in unison, “We’ve got POCKETS!” and the boys could say, “We’ve got SUSPENDERS!” and then we’d go from there. Oh my. Just writing that, I’m embarrassed to be part of the Rees-Beck family. I can only imagine the mortification of our new children. And we hadn’t even performed it yet.

That came on the ferry boat. For some reason I thought we'd have more time. To say that we had the worst cheer is an understatement. To pull off something like this, you need buy-in. We had none. We awkwardly mumbled something about pockets and suspenders and earned a “better luck next time” from our stake president, the trail boss. Our new children looked longingly at other families. I caught sight of our real-life daughter watching our cheer from afar. Her mouth dropped open and she shook her head and shielded her face. Her life-long suspicions were confirmed---without her guidance, her parents descended into complete and total nerdiness. Pioneer trek could only improve from here.