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.