How Do You Babyproof A Violin?

Teaching a three-year-old to play the violin is hard. Teaching a three-year-old to play the violin while taking care of his soon-to-be-mobile little brother is even harder. Doing it all while sleep-deprived is nearly impossible. Like all little babies, Charlie seems to gravitate towards the things that are most dangerous and inappropriate for him to play with. This includes Joshua's 1/16th size violin and bow. Many practice sessions have only nearly missed calamity. Then at last week's lesson, a small disaster: Charlie finally got ahold of the violin. As is the routine of a mother, I was running late and juggling too many things with babe in arms. While I was busy taking the violin out of the case, trying to get Josh's wet shoes off, and keeping Charlie from grabbing the dog's face, Charlie saw his opportunity and triumphantly reached out and grabbed the little instrument right out of my hand. He threw it boldly onto the floor of the teacher's entryway. The chinrest popped off, but thankfully the wood didn't crack. Our wonderful teacher was able to fix everything good as new, and the lesson proceeded successfully, although Charlie kept making lunges towards the bow whenever he could.

I actually believe that Charlie is going to be the violinist of the family, long after Joshua has moved on to some other pursuit. In the spirit of the Suzuki mother-tongue approach, Charlie will have heard the songs and watched the techniques almost from day one of his life. Who knows what grows in these little acorns? As long as they find happiness, I'm sure it matters not.

I Should Quit Worrying So Much

After having a babysitter last night, Joshua tells me this morning, "Jane [not her real name] has a friend named Jeremiah." My mom mind starts racing with all kinds of images of teenagers gone wild, thinking the babysitter I trusted had invited her boyfriend over while I was gone. "Who's Jeremiah?" I ask suspiciously. Joshua replies, "He's a bullfrog. He's a good friend of hers."

Catching Up

In a typical pattern of early autumn creativity coinciding with the start of the academic year followed by the stagnant slump of daylight savings time, I abandoned my blog for a bit as my brain worked to adjust to the change of rhythm. October proved to be a very busy month for the symphony, and my evenings were booked solid with music-making and baby-raising and all sorts of non-bloggable nonsense. Joshua stopped taking naps during the day after a week-long battle of the wills in which I regret to say he trounced the parental team. By the way, the parental team has mainly consisted of myself for a good eighteen of the twenty four hours a day, the other six hours being when the young ones (young ones being my two sons and my husband) are sleeping anyways (sleeping meaning two hour stretches of lying down in between cries for favorite parental team member [myself] to assist in some fashion or other) because said husband is attempting to get tenured status at the university while also throwing down brilliant tenor sax solos nightly at various clubs withing a two hour drive of our home.

So, without further ado or excuses, here are pictures of the children on Halloween:


At left, brave young Joshua in his Gladiator suit, or as he likes to call himself, "Dragonslayer Dave".

At right, Mr. Charlie, our baby dragon who's just happy to be outside eating leaves.

I'm just happy to get the pictures up before Thanksgiving.

Constructing Phrases

I'm playing a gig tomorrow with the orchestra in which we have been asked to dress up as construction workers. The Maestro will be using a hammer to conduct (actually pound out) the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Busloads of sixth-graders will descend upon the performance hall to hear me play variations on "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" while I'm wearing my son's plastic yellow hard-hat. Sometimes it's hard to believe I get paid for this.

A Rare Perfect Day

Sundays. Generally, I hate them. The final day of the weekend always gets eaten up by chores to get ready for the work week, shopping trips for household necessities, and preschooler interventions after candy-intensive fun binges. Add to this the aimless mornings sipping tea in our pajamas while we watch the kids tear the house apart, and there you have it. The week is over.

Today, we had a Plan. Recognizing that our older son is desperately in need of a return to the unrealistic expectations of attentiveness he enjoyed prior to the arrival of young Charlie, we arranged a special preschooler-only outing for him. Leaving the baby in the capable and indulgent hands of the grandparents, we whisked Joshua away to the big city for a day out on the town. (The Town being Denver, home of the Broncos and birthplace of White-People Jazz.) If you don't know Joshua very well, I should perhaps explain that he has rather cultured tastes for a three-year-old. One of his favorite DVDs is a performance of Stravinsky's Firebird ballet. He likes listening to classical music, and can sing all the instrumental themes of Peter and the Wolf. I suppose having two parents involved in the arts has shaped his tastes somewhat. Don't get me wrong, he still thinks poop is really funny, but he does have a flair for all things dramatic.

So we took him to see the hit Broadway musical, "The Lion King". Before it started, he seemed a little nervous because he thought there would be real lions on stage. Once it started, though, he was totally engaged the whole time. He's never seen the Disney animated movie, so the story was new to him. He sat quietly the whole time, applauded enthusiastically, and told us afterwards that he liked "EVERYTHING"! He also enjoyed walking around downtown briefly, seeing all the skyscrapers. We had a nice sushi dinner, and returned to a happy baby, an easy bedtime, and now a bit of free time. I suppose I'll have to do some laundry now, but at least the week has been saved.

Another Halloween Idea Exchange

Joshua: Are we going to decorate our house with cobwebs?

Me: Maybe. We have a lot of cobwebs on the *inside* of our house, though. Isn't that spooky enough?

Joshua: Are we going to decorate our house with poop?

Me: No, Halloween isn't really about poop.

Joshua: Yeah... Halloween is about BUGS!

We Have an Understanding

Joshua (wearing a plastic red fireman hat): Let's get in the firetruck and go warn people not to play with fire.

Me (wearing a plastic yellow construction helmet because I get to be "the captain"): Just a minute. I have to fix my hair. I can't fight fires with bad hair.

Joshua: Yeah, mom, I know.

Big Throbbing Organ and Alternative Lifestyles

This week I am spending my evenings rehearsing with the regional orchestra in which I play second flute. The theme of this Saturday's concert is Dreams of Power and Decadence, or as I have renamed it, Dreams of Better Tuning in the String Section.

Up until the first rehearsal, I admit that I was not looking forward to playing this concert because it features an organ soloist (those of you with maturity levels rivaling a twelve-year-old's may please insert a big throbbing organ joke here) and I can't remember the last time I enjoyed the oft blathering sounds of the pipe organ. The concert opens with the seldomly performed Toccata Festiva by Barber, which contains unusual sounds that will, I'm guessing, confuse the little old ladies that salt and pepper the plush red seats of the hall. Think of an ethereal Take Me Out to The Ballgame in a spiral nebula, or the custom sounds of Martian cell-phone ringtones downloaded from a planetarium. And a triple canon with organ, French horn, and timpani. The concert also includes the Saint-Saens Symphony #3, which includes some incredibly powerful and glorious moments courtesy of that big throbbing organ which you were sniggering about before. If you know the difference between listening to a recording of music in your car versus hearing it live in a concert hall, now imagine sitting in the middle of the orchestra feeling every vibration down in your gut, through the soles of your feet. I feel an overwhelming urge to get up and cheer during moments of this music.

The organist, a colleague of my husband's at the university, was telling us about an odd occurrence which he takes part in regularly: midnight organ recitals. As it turns out, these after-hours concerts are extremely popular with the Goth crowd. He is planning his next concert for Halloween night. I thought that to be an interesting pairing of two fringe elements, the pasty faced and slightly archaic classical organists of the world entertaining the also pale and black-lipstick-wearing Gothic audience with the obligatory Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

When I really try and picture it, though, I always see The Count from Sesame Street in the audience. "ONE spiky leather dog collar, TWO spiky leather dog collars... ah ah ah!" Perhaps I'll have to attend one of the recitals just to see if any muppets show up.

An Omen?

I'm not sure what this portends, but this morning when I dumped out Joshua's cereal bowl into the sink, I saw very clearly that the discarded Double Vision Apple Jacks (Limited Edition) spelled out, in soggy pastel pink and green, the word "BOOB".

The Scoop on the Birthday Party

Birthday parties for young children can sometimes feel like they were put together more for the mom's sake than the child's. This celebration of a special milestone seems to separate the regular Pick Up The Cake At The Grocery Store moms from the Supermoms Who Make Pinatas By Hand and Stay Up All Night Decorating Cupcakes Using Tiny Magic Tools Which They Stole From Fairies. Just so we're clear, I fall into the former category. Being that I am terribly unorganized and indifferent about party themes and planning (you can read about my feelings regarding rampant commercialism aimed at children in a previous post, Commie Elmo: Dictatorship of the Proletariat Muppet), I really wanted to have Joshua's input for the party as much as possible. Here's what he came up with: First of all, he wanted to have a garage sale. We had to nix this idea on the grounds that it seemed really weird, and I don't have time to clean out the garage. After giving up on the garage sale, most important to him was the cake. I told him that if I tried to make his cake, it would turn out to be a disgusting dirty cake with flies buzzing around it and we would have to throw it in the trash (true) so he agreed to let the baker at the grocery store make it. He picked this violin design to go on top:
He wanted to have the party at his favorite park by the railroad tracks, which worked out well because we got to see not one but two freight trains go by on the day of his party. The only downside to our park locale was that we didn't arrive early enough to get a picnic table, so we spread our blankets downwind from the Chain-Smoking White Trash Spongebob Celebration. They may have had the Spongebob pinata to entertain and humiliate their blindfolded and wife-beater-wearing birthday guests, but we had the miraculous inflatable jumping castle. Thanks to the wonders of a long extension cord and an even longer friendship with a family that owns this sensational house of bounce, my three year old and all his buddies thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon of collisions, cake, and chocolate ice cream. Joshua wanted to give everyone a flower, so we handed out daisies with our goody bags. With cooperative weather and a sedated three year old at the end of the day, I think we claimed a success, but of course the rumbling sound of the freight trains drowned out any complaints the guests may have had. Next stop: Halloween candy coma.

Three and Thirty Two

In addition to our DNA and our love of tofu, Joshua and I also share the same birthday. Lest anyone think we must surely be twins, I feel it is my responsibility to point out that I am not three years old. It has become a tradition to take a birthday photo of the two of us, to record for posterity Joshua's journey towards the land of Grownupville (and my inevitable haggard arrival at the sagging gates of Old Cronytown). You can see the how much Josh has grown from the first birthday photo here, and birthday number two here. Here is our latest milestone photo-op:


Getting a nice photo of Joshua turned out to be tricky business this year, since his swaggering three-year-old attitude produced mainly shots like this one on the right. In fact, I had to bribe him this year with a lollipop to get him to sit for a photo at all. I imagine it will only get more difficult. All in all we had a pleasant day today. I woke up early and made apple-oat muffins for his preschool class. I feel it is necessary to try and get on the preschool teacher's good side, since most of the time Joshua insists on being called "The Duchess" while he's at school.

Young Joshua's birthday party was held this past weekend. Expect a post detailing this event in a day or two... but for now I must drag my old creaky bones to bed.

Jedi Potty-Training

Why, oh why, does young Joshua insist on going to the bathroom with the lights out? If this is some sort of toddler-jedi training exercise, then I'm sorry to say the force be not with him. Or perhaps the force is too strong with this one, for his aim is not true.

You Know You're A Mom When...

...you realize you've had a pinecone sitting in the cupholder of your Subaru for the last, oh, three weeks or so, yet you do nothing about it.

Toaster: 1. Toddler: 0

Preschoolers in general seem to be fairly idiosyncratic in their habits. I've been lucky to raise a nearly-three-year-old who is pretty laid back in the grander scheme of things. Sure he has his eccentricities, like how he doesn't want the honey stirred into the yogurt or how he insists on not wearing his pants between the hours of 2:00-4:00 pm, but as a rule he is eager to try new things, and can easily go with the flow.

I finally found something that really troubles him. My husband moved the toaster.

A few weeks ago, Peter uncharacteristically decided to do some cleaning in the kitchen. He did a very thorough job which included a little reorganizing of countertop space. He opted to move the toaster from the right side of the oven to the left side, closer to the microwave.

This has thrown Joshua into a toddler tailspin of anxiety.

"Why did daddy move the toaster over there? When is he going to move it back?" He asked. I told him we would try keeping it over by the microwave for a little while. I assured him that we could still make toast with butter and jelly. I even made him a couple of slices, cut into triangles as is the preferred method. He looked worried. (I might add here that Joshua is not at all obsessed with things being clean or in order. He will happily exist in a room strewn with toys, discarded socks, and half-eaten crackers.) Later that day, he started eyeing the appliance dubiously. "The toaster is supposed to go over there." I told him we would keep trying it daddy's way for a little while. "Please move the toaster back!" He started getting that wrinkled up forehead which signals the onset of a tantrum. I redirected his energies to a new activity, and he forgot about the toaster.

So I thought. Days later, he continues to ask when we're going to move it back. I realize it would be easier to just move the thing back to its original spot, but I feel that it is important for Joshua to accept simple changes in his life. We must pick our battles, and by golly I think I can win the one about the toaster.

My Day Out With Thomas the Strategically Marketed Money Making Engine

I'd like to begin this post with an apology to my two children for having cynical uncool parents who generally don't enjoy attending special kids' events other than for reasons of fueling our sarcasm and studying the media's influence on society from a distance. We know it simply makes you happy to ride on Thomas the Tank Engine, or probably any train for that matter. I would also like to say that I think the wooden Thomas railway toys are excellent toys. My son plays with his train set every day, in a very focused and imaginative way. I don't think it matters to him whether it is specifically Thomas the Tank Engine gear, but he does like having a set of characters he can get to know and collect.

We spent the morning at an outing called Day Out With Thomas. Bucketfulls of budding little engineers (most decked out in their finest Thomaswear) and their parents were bussed in to a train museum to meet Thomas the Tank Engine and friends, to ride the rails with that cheeky little blue engine, and presumably purchase Thomas merchandise to further fuel their media-hyped obsession with the Empire of Really Useful Marketing Engines. A lot of little boys and girls love trains. (They also love dirt, but I haven't yet seen the emergence of a kids' Festival of Filth, where they sell T-Shirts smeared with mud, and Junior can get his picture taken with the fun-loving Sir Sandbox Turd.) All sarcasm aside, Joshua did enjoy himself. I'm glad we went, because seeing all the train related stuff was interesting. We decided we would like to come back to the Railway Museum on another Day Without Thomas, and explore some more. And yes, we did contribute to the cause and buy Joshua a souvenir... a wooden train whistle. With Thomas on it. *Sigh*.

File Under: Weird Things My Preschooler Says

"Mom, I'm tired of playing with trucks. I want to see the world."

Brothers

When I listen to myself talk out loud about my kids to other (often childless) people, I find myself wondering if, first of all, they are actually listening or just nodding politely while they consider whether or not I think they look fat in those newfangled "skinny" jeans, and second of all, if they are mystified as to why anyone would want to have the little buggers. It seems difficult to convince someone without children of the elusive rewards one sometimes feels when the baby sleeps for a good five hours and you managed to wash your hair while the other one was, as it turns out, scribbling a Sharpie pen on the carpet.

Since Charlie is learning to sit up and is outgrowing his plastic baby bathtub, I decided to put him in the bath with Joshua for the first time tonight. The delight expressed by their faces was wondrous and warming, their squeals of laughter broke through my end-of-the-day exhaustion, and I smiled at the two brothers. Parenthood is hard. Loving is easy.

A Day in the Life of Music

It's eight-twenty-two in the morning. I grab Joshua's Suzuki violin materials and stuff them in a gigantic red tote bag which I got at the hospital when Charlie came home. Violin, notebook, CD, check. Carpet square with the outline of Joshua's feet so he knows where to stand, check. Rocketship finger puppet to be placed on the tip of his bow, check. Amusing cuddly playthings for Charlie, big quilt for him to lie down and drool upon, check. Big red tote bag, diaper bag, purse, preschooler, and infant in carseat all get loaded into the car. Eight twenty-five now. Backing out of the driveway, Joshua throws a fit because he wants his teddy-bear Honkees to ride with us. Run in, get Honkees, drive to violin lesson which is mercifully on the same end of town. We are on-time people, so we manage to pull up right at eight-thirty. Thirty minute violin lesson, during which we play with dinosaurs, sing a song about monkeys, do a dance while Joshua holds the violin under his chin, and Charlie spits up on my shirt. Lesson is over, Honkees stayed in the car the whole time.

My house is a mess, so I do the minimum amount of work necessary to not feel embarrased when the afternoon babysitter comes over. The morning passes quickly as we play. At one point Joshua convinces me to put in a movie for him, so I let him watch half an hour of Winnie The Pooh while I take Charlie upstairs to the music room to do a bit of work. Charlie lays on his blanket and giggles at me while I play a few warm-ups on flute. He seems to delight in listening to Bach, so I play a few movements of a sonata for him, making silly faces during the rests so he will let me finish. I tell Josh he has to turn off the movie, and he thankfully obliges but insists on taking off his pants for some reason. He comes up to the music room, pulls out an old clarinet and pretends to play a duet with me. I settle for this practice time, with my older son dancing around in his underwear playing on a half-put-together clarinet, and my younger son amusing himself thoughtfully with my toes. When I realize that Charlie is actually trying to nurse on my foot, I know my luck has run out and I give up.

After lunch and naps, Joshua decides five minutes before the babysitter is coming over that he would like to practice his violin. His teacher wants him to place the instrument under his chin ten times each day. We use one of Charlie's toys with wooden beads to count the repetitions. He starts to lose interest after five times, so we make up ridiculous phrases for him to say each time he holds the violin. Number six is "peanut butter applesauce!" and number nine is "gopher guts!" and I can't remember the rest but Joshua probably does. Charlie thinks the whole thing is hilarious. The babysitter rings the doorbell, which means my first flute student will be arriving in about ten minutes. I pick up my studio which is cluttered with sheet music, instrument parts, baby blankets and trains. Joshua and Charlie do normal kid stuff with the sitter all afternoon while I'm teaching.

Dinner, baths, bedtime, Peter is finally home. We catch up for a few minutes. I have to learn the music for the next symphony concert, so I head down to the basement and have a good time playing. The kids sleep through it.

New Life, Old Soul?

I honestly don't know if I believe in reincarnation or past lives, nor do I necessarily consider that mystery to be important in this life, but I will say this: Joshua has firmly stated several times that when he "used to be big", he lived in California, played the trumpet, and rode a unicycle.

Reading, Writing, Ranting

I've always taken great pleasure in books, and find that reading tends to feed and inspire my interest in writing. Browsing through bookstores and libraries relaxes me, as long as my kids aren't with me. Some simple requirements of the books I tend to gravitate towards:

1) Currently, I need to be able to hold the book comfortably in one hand. Much of my reading is done while feeding my infant son. I have been putting off reading Don DeLillo's Underworld for quite some time for this very reason. I'm still not sure how I managed to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest when my first son was a baby.

2) It must absolutely not mention lipstick in the title or be marketed in any way as "Chick Lit". Sorry, Oprah, this means you. Also, if there is a Hollywood starlet on the cover, I won't buy it.

3) The subject matter cannot be related to bunnies. I'm sorry to say I've never finished Richard Adams' Watership Down because bunnies make me very sleepy.

4) I prefer paperback novels with a matte finish. We all have our peculiarities.

So what am I reading these days?

1) Herzog by Saul Bellow. All that letter writing sort of reminds me of blogging.

2) Work as a Spiritual Practice by Lewis Richmond. Although I generally enjoy my work as orchestral flautist and teacher (exception: getting splashed with fake blood while performing in the pit orchestra for Mozart's opera Don Giovanni last month), this book is nice to leaf through when I feel trapped being a stay-at-home-mom or when I am stressing out about the orchestra.

3) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling. This one I am reading aloud to Joshua. I was actually surprised by how much he's interested in it, considering the fact that there are no pictures (and he's nearly three). He'll sit and listen for a good half hour, several times a day. I think his attention span has something to do with the fact that we don't watch a lot of television. Oh yes, and it's a good story.

The Enchanted Pantry

Not to brag or anything, but I have a Miracle Pantry. My pantry is seemingly capable of generating it's own perpetual pasta supply. As dinnertime approaches and I begin digging deep into the oak recesses, pushing aside the seven-grain pilaf (too time consuming), the falafel mix (what was I thinking?) and the inexplicable chicken broth my mother bought me when I was sick once (yes, even vegetarians get sick, and when they do, they don't eat chicken), I am greeted by box upon box of noodles in all shapes and sizes. Penne, cellentani, rotini. Elbows and shells both medium and large, pinwheel pasta, bow-ties, campanelle. Spaghetti, spaghetti rigati, angel-hair, linguine, fettuccine, even adorable little orzo and giant no-boil lasagne, both flat and crinkly varieties. It's an inexhaustable cache.

The secret of my prodigous pantry is two-fold. First of all, I always buy pasta whenever I am at the store. It's cheap, easy to cook, and doesn't spoil. Children find it very edible. Second, my husband and I have an unspoken understanding that when I say that all we have for dinner is pasta, he is to suggest that he "go out and grab us something a little more interesting". Yes, when I play the pasta card, what I am actually saying is that we are going to have take-out from that nice Japanese restaurant up the road, or perhaps an impromptu trip to the Indian buffet, admittedly a bit pricier than spaghetti. My husband gleefully plays along. You see, my preschool-age child enjoys all these other foods as well (we don't know about the baby yet, but since I'm breastfeeding, I hope he will at least be used to the flavors), and eating pasta is actually lower down on our preferences even than Poverty Stew (our way of cleaning out the fridge). Thus, pasta goes largely uneaten in our house, and the pantry is actually producing high quality restaurant meals.

I Like Me Better With Caffeine

In an effort to achieve greater health and well-being, my husband brought home a copy of a self-help book by a certain nutrition guru/nazi and thus began his quest to improve his diet which, at the time of the book purchase, included vast amounts of Pepsi, coffee, beer, and Sesame Chicken. My husband once spent an entire semester eating the same thing for lunch every day: Sesame Chicken, fried rice, and a large Pepsi. I was quite surprised to discover his commitment to forgo all his favorite dehydrating and urinary-tract-irritating beverages, his nightly glass of scotch, and even his red meats! He started guzzling water instead (probably contaminated with lead, the nutri-nazi warns us: we'd better get a water filter quickly before cancer sets in!), sipping anti-oxidant-laden green tea along with his brown rice and veggies. You could almost see his arteries breathing a sigh of relief. I thought this was an incredible step for someone who was raised on a farm in Nebraska on the stereotypical meat/potatoes/corn medley. (Being that opposites attract, it seems logical that he then married a vegetarian.)

So inspired by his lifestyle alterations was I, that I decided to give up coffee at the same time. At this point I think it's worth mentioning that I have a five month old baby in addition to my preschooler, and neither one of these adorable wee bairns sleep through the night. I am typically roused from a light sleep several times before dawn, sometimes to roll a frustrated newborn onto his back again after he gets stuck on his tummy, sometimes to get water for Joshua because he's "scared of shadows", and once to deny Joshua his violin practice time at 5:00 am. Coffee had become a habitual part of my persona. Dark, thick, tenacious, a brew to be reckoned with, but never to be offered to company, as I'm fairly certain it was also THE WORST coffee ever percolated this side of McDonalds.

A few days after stumbling about grumpily and complaining about how the namby-pamby green tea doesn't go well with pancakes, I realized two things: number one, I did feel better physically. Number two, it seems that the absorption of coffee into my system not only propped me up in the mornings, but was apparently also responsible for whatever charm or pizzazz I may have possessed at one time. Caffeine-free, I no longer boasted a quick wit, nor was I tickled pink. Trying to sustain a lighthearted conversation was a chore and a charade. Things improved a bit after a few weeks, but I still notice the absence of the anti-depressant effects. The consequences of sleep deprivation are more evident.

I'm continuing the experiment, attempting to get used to feeling pleasant but not excitable. Being even-keeled feels better than getting the jitters, but I must admit, I like me better with caffeine.

Snapshots of Kooky Preschooler-Land

Holy blogger-bypass, Batman, it's been about a year since I've posted to this thing. I thought I would give it the old college try again, in an effort not to bore myself.

My preschooler is coming up on birthday number three. The other day a friend of ours asked him what he is going to do to celebrate his birthday, and he replied that he would like to have a garage sale. Also, he remarked, he would like everyone to have a flower. Then, he wondered aloud if I might like to have a rock for my birthday, which just happens to be the same date as his. It sounds like we're going to have quite a party.