This post is brought to you by midnight stress cleaning. Bedtime didn't work quite as planned this evening, and in the end, I, of the three people in bed, lay awake feeling stressed about all the *stuff* in our apartment, plotting what I could get rid of and reorganize and, ever so kindly, how I could yell at Jared to please let me get rid of *everything* right now, because I can't take it any more. So, anyway, sleep wasn't going well. I got up and cleaned out the fridge, fixed our "pantry" shelf that had broken, and found a way to get all of the groceries which have been sitting on the dining room floor for the last few weeks under the supposition that there was nowhere else to put them, into cabinets and shelves. I also made a list of things that are departing home tomorrow when I go to feed my brother's cat: boxes, Goodwill items, and the container of Linda's we've forgotten to give back for three months now. For the record, I no longer feel quite so stressed and I'm not planning to yell at Jared any more. I still do wish I had two weeks of vacation and no one else home so I could go into clean-out/reorganize/declutter/home-improvement frenzy. Not going to happen...
This post, however, has nothing to do with the state of disarray.
Friday we drove to Jared's parents' after we taught. Saturday, we left Anne with them for 48 hours and flew to LA. Sunday and Monday we took the Suzuki Principles in Action course with the amazing Christie Felsing, and then we flew back to Oregon. Tuesday we drove home and had a late-night Bach Concertos rehearsal.
This was a big deal for Anne - it was the first time she's been left over night, and then it ended up being three nights without Mommy, due to circumstances I shall later describe. She did really well, and I was fine, too, in the manner of speaking about separation anxiety. So we've sort of entered a new phase of possibilities for our family travel.
I'm not sure there was anything particularly new to me in the SPA course, but it was such a fantastic review of so many topics we've covered in other training courses. The most amazing thing about it was the amount of experience in the room. Each of the twelve teachers in the room had between several years and several decades of teaching under their belts, a collective ton of Suzuki training, and that's not to mention the quite a bit of conservatory training and professional performing experience and college teaching experience, so the discussion was, to put it mildly, quite rich. It was also an opportunity to visit with friends and acquaintances from the music world and meet some wonderful new-to-us people.
In the two lessons I've taught since I've been back, I've been more careful to communicate my expectations to students clearly and concretely and to not give up and expect less of them when things didn't come back from previous lessons the way I hoped. This isn't an example from today, but last week I had a lesson with a student where I heard the same five minor scales.Again. I was starting to get irritated that he didn't play them correctly on the first try, since I'm positive he's capable. I looked back in my notebook during the lesson and realized I'd first assigned those scales starting in December... of 2014. What was the deal??? It occurred to me that maybe this student didn't realize he was supposed to play them correctly so we could go on and learn something new. Maybe he just thought he was supposed to play them at every lesson for the rest of his life. So I took a very concrete action and told him the goal was to play them correctly on the first try, and I asked if he would need more information to be able to do it, or more focus in his practice, and he said all he needed was to focus more in his practice, confirming my suspicion that I should have told him he was supposed to get them right on the first try. I expect several breakthroughs in my own mind of this sort of things in the coming weeks.
SPA - gateway to more concrete communication of expectations to my students and their parents...
That was gateway #1.
A week ago Sunday Anne had a stomach bug, and the two of us spent the night on the living room floor with a pile of towels handy. This Monday, the second day of the SPA course, I was feeling a little odd when I got up, and things got worse during the day, such that I did not eat lunch, and I took the afternoon portion of the course lying on the floor using my violin case for a pillow. This enabled me to feel quite decent and to participate frequently in the conversation. However, I dreaded Monday afternoon's travel, because I knew it wasn't going to involve much lying on the floor.
We had, so we thought, a ride slated to pick us up at 3:05 to drive us the ninety miles through LA traffic from Loma Linda to LAX for our 7:40 flight. After standing in the parking lot for a few minutes, we discovered that the ride was booked for the wrong day. So I lay down on the floor of the classroom again while Jared made a bunch of phone calls and found a local, private cab driver who was available. He showed up in about 20 minutes in his unmarked car, and graciously told us that he usually charges $250 for LAX but would give us the rate he give the university employees who prebook with him, which was
substantially less. Anyway, the traffic was pretty good, and we made it to the airport in just over two hours. He apologized for not having brought us tea - he had just been making some for himself when Jared called, but he did bring us two bottles of water. Over the course of our drive we learned a few fun facts about him. He is retired from Boeing, and lived in Kent for three years, just a couple of miles from where we live. He grew up in Yugoslavia and came to the US after high school for adventure and travel and never left. Did I mention it was the longest and most awful car ride of my life? Nausea. Awful. And I couldn't lie down. I think I had to use some of the coping tips I learned for labor. Thankfully, this wonderful driver was happy to cut across five lanes of traffic so I could throw up in the median. Jared gave him a huge tip.
The two hours at LAX were the BEST hours of the afternoon/evening. I can't tell you how wonderful it was to lie on the floor of a dirty, busy airport next to a trash can with my jacket over my face and pretend to sleep.
The flight was *not* great in nausea land, but I didn't end up needing the airsick bags I'd requested while we were boarding. Due to divine intervention, we ended up unexpectedly in exit row seating, which meant once we took off (which was *forever* after we boarded), I could use the germ-y tray table for a pillow and approximate lying down, which would not have been possible in a regular row. After we deplaned in Portland, I lay on the airport floor again for a while until I got up the nerve to walk to the car. Things improved from there. Although I spent the night in a sleeping bag in the bedroom closest to the bathroom, just in case, while Anne and Jared slept in the usual spot down the hallway.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that since Thanksgiving, the three of us, Jared, Anne, and I, have sustained a total of seven colds and three stomach bugs. We shared one of the colds with both my parents and my grandmother, and we shared the fever/stomach bug this last weekend with Jared's mom, too, although she was not as sick as Anne and I were,
very thankfully. In every case but one, Anne has gotten the bug first and then passed it around. She is our disease gateway at the moment.
So there's gateway #2.
Ok, does anyone have suggestions for avoiding all these viruses? It is the rainy, dark season where everyone stays indoors as much as possible with the windows closed. And we see a BIG pile of kids every week, interacting with them, often hands-on, in our house, and in two other houses. So there's hand washing and trying to get enough sleep and not sharing utensils and all of that jazz. But seriously, do you have any other tried-and-true tricks? I want it to be summer already, because I'm tired of the sick season.
