Recording Project

While Anne was at school Friday, and Jared and Lazarus were out on their run, Laurel and I went out back to my tiny studio and recorded several tracks for my students:

• a fiddle tune and a student composition for my Tuesday group class
• three student compositions, a fiddle tune, and a jazz tune for my Thursday group class
• a practice version of the Bach Double 1st movement for a student
• the Kuhlau Waltz for which there is no violin recording available
• a cadenza for the 2nd movement of the Mozart Bb Concerto for which there is no violin recording available

And then I had a few minutes left and I was inspired to record the Bach D Minor Allemande just for fun.  It has barely been practiced lately, but it's been in my repertoire for around 21 or 22 years...  It actually turned out ok, although the pulse had a bit of trouble getting off the ground with the flow at the opening.  

Anyway, for your amusement, I'm sharing the Allemande and the cadenza for the Mozart...

Instructions for School Drop Off

Usually, school drop off or pick up happens in such a way that a kid or two stays home.  But for those times when another adult isn't available and the whole crew goes, here are the drop off instructions, for your amusement.

1) Assist Anne in cello practice.  This usually involves a few tooth extractions, and don't assume that having a musician parent makes this easier.  I am absolutely certain it makes it harder.  But in the end you get to hear her play ten beautiful May Songs and watch her enjoy trying to figure out how to read notes.

2) Ask Anne what food she wants to take in her "lunch."  Prep food (e.g. wash out her thermos, microwave potatoes to put in her thermos, find her a fork, slice up apple and put it in a plastic box) and find out that whatever you got for her was the wrong thing.  Until she notices that you slipped in a surprise chocolate soy milk container, and she realizes everything is wonderful.

3) Tell her it's time to look at her list taped to the front door and pack her backpack.  (This is somewhat involved, as forest school requires being comfortable outdoors, regardless of the weather.  And being prepared for massive mud.)  As you can see, she needs to have socks, shoes, mud boots, mittens, a hat, her winter coat, snow pants, her rain jacket, rain pants, water bottle, and the aforementioned food.  Plus any discretional items of her choosing - like her headlamp...  She's pretty good at packing!

4) Try to convince Lazarus to wear more than a shirt and a diaper (his usual uniform) on account of the weather.  Stuff him into something and watch him take it all off again and redistribute it around the house while getting the winter attire required for the baby and the adult.

5) Find personal shoes.  Then take three kids out to the car, only one of whom can reliably carry their things, get into their seat, and buckle themselves.

6) Load and buckle Lazarus.  Load and buckle Laurel.

7) Collapse the off-roading stroller, dismount the front wheel, and stuff into the trunk.

8) Put wallet, phone, coat, hat for the baby, baby carrier, Lazarus's clothes and shoes, and perhaps a spare water bottle into the car while not losing the keys.

9) Drive the 14 minutes to school.

10) Pop the trunk and instruct Anne to start getting all her gear on.

11) Unload stroller and reassemble.

12) Retrieve Lazarus from his car seat.  Dress him.  (He'll keep the clothes on this time as he is actually feeling chilly in the great outdoors.)  Buckle him into the stroller.

13) Retrieve Laurel from her car seat.  Install her in the baby carrier.  Add her hat and my coat.

14) Assist Anne in finishing suiting up.

15) Lock the car without losing the keys.

16) Hike a quarter mile through the woods, mostly uphill, and through the mud (or some some occasions ice), pushing stroller and carrying baby.  This is actually quite pleasant and worth the work!

17) Sign Anne in.  Greet teachers and other parents.

18) Hike back through woods to the car.  Mostly downhill this time.

19) Unlock car, remove coat, take baby out of carrier, and reinstall in car seat.

20) Remove all of Lazarus' clothes except for shirt and diaper so you don't have to hear about him wanting the clothes off on the way home, and reinstall in his carseat.

21) Fold up stroller and remove front wheel.  Load that muddy puppy into trunk while trying not to trash personal attire (ha!)

22) Put all remaining clothes and service items back in car.

23) Drive 14 minutes home.

24) Remove Lazarus from carseat.  Put his shoes on him so he won't be too grumpy toed on the three-yard walk from the driveway to the front porch.  Remind him to take off his shoes before he goes inside.

25) Remove Laurel's entire carseat from car so she can continue her nap uninterrupted inside.

26) Remove any other remaining service items from the car.

27) Take a nap...  Just kidding.  Either it's time to get ready to teach lessons NOW or DO ALL THE THINGS while the little ones are sleeping and Anne's at school.

In other news, I wish the forest school went up through 12th grade, but no luck, so we have to find a different school situation for next year....  Maybe homeschool.  That will avoid the hardest part of parenting - trying to leave the house to go somewhere.

Holiday Spam

Truly, Christmas lights in a dark season are one of my favorites.  And I took a lot of pictures over the holidays.  If you missed fb, here you go.

We unexpectedly saw a friend at  Carpinito, while we were drinking hot apple cider, shopping for vegetables, and greeting two very unhappy reindeer and a bored camel named Moses.

I spent a decent amount of time in early December sitting at the piano learning parts for recitals.  I did a lot of accompanying.  Given the amount of music I needed to play artistically and the amount of time I had to practice, I practiced more intelligently and efficiently at the piano than I had before.  I've been thinking about that as I've been teaching some of my students who are slow to progress due to busy lives.

 Below:  not my photo.  We joined some other studios for a big concert at the Maple Valley LDS Church Nativity Festival.

And we took our Thursday group classes to play during the Christmas concert at the SDA church around the corner from us:

Jared and I (not my photo!) also played a couple of movements from the Messiah at our church's Christmas program:

Studio recital at the retirement home in Auburn:

Studio recital at the church where we teach in Gig Harbor:

Bad picture of a video I didn't take from our church's candlelight communion:

Hike at Snoqualmie Pass the day before our departure to Texas.  Snow pack was 29 inches.  

I carried Laurel on the hike, obviously.  And Lazarus was grumpy, so I carried him, too, allowing Jared to help Anne with snow shoes and sled....

First ever flight with 3 kids:

Followed by our connection:

I got to go to both Christmas Eve services at home.  This spot really is home now as my parents no longer live in the neighborhood where I grew up:

Christmas Day.  The boy was busy trying out new gifts.

Ed and Justin brought a game Ed never liked playing with his sisters when he was growing up.  It was still dumb:

My sister always had these same two fingers in her mouth when she was tiny:

Gift exchange with Emily and Morgan:

Born one hundred years and four days apart:

Musical fun at Emily's:

Morgan's adorable dog:

My guys 💙

My mom busted out with the party hats on the 30th as we were leaving on the 31st.

Happy New Year!  We arrived back at SeaTac after midnight Pacific time.  Which was after 2 am Central.

Gratuitous baby pic.

Another hike at Snoqualmie Pass for Jared's birthday.  It was exactly two weeks after the first, and the snow pack was now 49 inches.

The Mystery of Epiphany

This sounds like it is going to be a spiritual story, but it's not.

Yesterday was Epiphany, and I did want to mark it in some way.  But mainly it ended up being the irksome and no-fun sort of day between two weeks of travel and adventures and back-to-teaching.  That means a day devoted to catch-up.  Planned items which I accomplished were arranging the inner voices of the Romanze from Eine Kleine for my chamber group in Gig Harbor, folding approximately seven loads of laundry, and writing thank-you notes to the helpers in Bellingham.  I also ate, nursed people, changed diapers, took two showers, attempted to tidy, and went for a walk.

Then there was the unplanned mini-disaster in which a half-full bottle of bleach dislodged itself from its home on top of the washing machine during the spin cycle, and permanently sterilized a section of the laundry room floor.  The towels used to sop up the mess look brilliant and clean after having gone through a wash cycle of their own.  And we had to throw open the windows in the 40-something degree breezy drizzle and turn on the fans for an hour or two in order to defumigate.  Even today, it smells vaguely like the swimming pool at the high school where I took Anne for her swim lessons last summer.

And then there was the attempted Epiphany traditions.  Anne and I took about 30 seconds to chalk the front door faintly and to pray for those who enter there.

And then there was the King Cake.  I didn't make a special recipe, rather just a redux of the previous night's successful carrot cake off the internet, which I'd made for Jared's birthday.  But of course, one is supposed to put in a trinket.  Perhaps a small metal crown.  That I didn't have, but I washed the next best thing, my wedding band, and dropped it into the batter just before I poured it into the pan to bake.

So of course, Anne kept cutting random pieces out of the cake looking for the ring, Jared chewed slowly and carefully, I shoveled some in absent-mindedly, and Lazarus ate his while running around the house and dumped a piece in the bath, which I rescued and tossed in the trash.

And then thought better of it.  What if it was in the piece in the trash???  So I gloved up and dissected the trash bag.  Not there.

So then it seemed logical to look for it in the cake pan, because I was feeling a bit nude without it and was ready to have it back.  So we cut up the rest of the cake and poked all the 1/2 inch pieces with a fork, and squeezed them all for good measure, and the ring was clearly not there.

So maybe Lazarus found it in a piece and dumped it somewhere under the furniture.  And meanwhile Jared had vacuumed.   So I gloved up again and dissected the vacuum cleaner bag.  Pretty filthy. And the ring was not there.  Where could it have gone?

As we went to bed, I had the horrible thought that one of us must have swallowed it unawares.  After everyone was asleep, I crept out of bed, and did a little reading.  It turns out many people on the internet have managed to swallow rings, and some of them did not notice.  And it also turns out that ERs now sometimes use a hand-held metal detector on children to discovered foreign objects in them.

After I finally managed to conk out and wake up in the morning, I formulated a reasonable plan of action.  I ascertained that my brother did not own a metal detector, but there was a tool store near his work which sells reasonably priced wands and which had them in stock, and I had gotten him lined up to pick me up one of these to bring it up to my house ASAP to figure out which one of us had swallowed my ring and then determine if we needed to take any sort of medical action, or grosser, probably watching for it to come through the plumbing.

And just before my brother was to leave work on this errand, Lazarus picked up a piece of well-poked over cake off the table and took a bite, and out popped my wedding ring.  A bit more orange than before (it was a carrot cake, and now the ring looks more brass-y than gold-y) but most definitely NOT in someone's intestines.

Anyway, I keep having to laugh at myself today.

Holding onto a Night

Some moments in life are worth the inconvenience of a lifetime, because they will be remembered for a lifetime.  Such was yesterday night in Bellingham.

It is hard to put into words the complete insanity of the endeavor.  There were emails and emails and texts back and forth in the days just before, while we were in Texas, to make arrangements for six people to spend the night in Bellingham in two different location, two separate childcare events with two different caregivers, and the locations for the kids to play, which included considerations for two separate dogs.  We mapped addresses of the two different homes where we were to be put up, the rehearsal location, the concert venue...  There were flights returning to Seattle in the tired, dark, discombobulated wee hours from another time zone.  Some of them involved the responsibilities of packing for and traveling with small children who don't like being cooped up in tiny aircraft seats any more than their more stoic elders do.  Some of them involved an unexpected lock-out of a car and house for the night and missing a day of work.  There was cat care arranged in two homes for yet another night away.  There was attempted practice and rehearsal and milk pumping for the baby.  There was the chaos of laundry and unpacking in a very small space from the first trip.  There was the packing up and coordinating of two cars to transport the six people, the cello, and all the needed luggage, including sleeping bags, and a big box of toys for one of the aforementioned childcare events.  There was a drive north in the dark which involved a detour for gasoline and snacks, in which the various actors missed each other in the parking lot.  There was the late-night drop off of Linda with our mother's cousin in a downtown condo building, and then the late-night arrival of the Ballances at the home of a former student family with a view overlooking the extensive, misty lake and mountains rising up out of it.  And in the morning after the power went out and eventually came back on there was the renegotiating of the first childcare venue, the pick-up of Linda from the cousin and drop-off of the kids with the toy box and diapers and pumped milk, and the drive to the rehearsal studio.  And the return drive to the cousin's home for music left behind. 

And then we sat down in a remodeled garage with Adam in town from Cleveland.  Our organizer had lent us her little studio, painted a cheerful yellow and with sparkling Christmas lights strung up.  The weather was storming dramatically outside, but we worked our way through the entire Brahms G Minor Piano Quartet in the course of a few hours, and all the inconvenience was already worth it.  What wonderful music!  And we each heard new things in it we hadn't grasped back in August.  That is the thing about some of the great works - you discover new things every time you go back to them.  It was a little oasis in time.

And then off we rushed into the storm, careening around the stunningly beautiful (though rainy and grey) city of Bellingham full of well-kept old homes, views of the whitecaps breaking in the oceans, and mountains all around, with GPS looking for some coffee, and then back to rescue Cousin from the kids.  They all had a lovely time, and created some art projects and ate snacks, in addition to playing with the things we brought.  And... they wore out the dog.

We loaded up our two cars and drove back to the home of my student family so that we could eat something mid-afternoon, Jared could take Lazarus out for a sopping nap run in the storm, I could nurse the two little kids, and we could practice and get dressed.  I never made it to the practice part on account of the other things, but no matter - at least the rehearsal had been a good warm up.  Then there was the arrival of introduction to a new babysitter - instructions, getting the kids acquainted, food put out, diapers found...  And off we darted rather at the last minute into the storm in the dark to another address north of town.

Then time stopped.  I wanted to hold onto these few hours forever.  We parked and walked into the doors of an old, one-room school, turned home.  We found ourselves in a little antechamber with windows and cozy seating, and a rack to hang up our coats.  After peeling off our wet things we stepped through the French doors into a long, tall room with a plentitude of soaring windows, framing the gusting, pouring black outside.  The wide, white, wooden trim and wainscoting spoke of a well-cared-for space built a century before.  The wooden floor, impressed with age and use, was topped with sturdy and beautifully patterned rugs.  The walls were painted a sophisticated, dusky yellow, and long, graceful light fixtures hung from the high, white ceiling.  Those over the black grand piano were lit, along with myriad white votive candles scattered about on window sills, and decorative candles arranged invitingly on tables.  More soft light came from the string of white wrapped around the lanky, soaring spruce, brought in for Christmas, and sparsely hung with clear, glass harp ornaments.  In addition to welcoming and comfortable sofas and chairs, the room was furnished with beautifully-kept antique tables, desks, and chests about the perimeter.  Four harps stood about the room, and a double bass was laid unobtrusively on its side behind the piano.  Thirty or so people were seated about the room on the chairs and sofas; some children lounged on pillows on the floor, and just before the concert began, our hostess stoked a roaring, crackling fire in the enormous, water-smoothed stone fire place near the center of the room.  The atmosphere was magical, and the company there to enjoy an evening of Brahms was easily transported to a realm of joy.  In addition to our piece, another beautiful violist presented the Eb Major Sonata with Adam.  Enjoy we all did, performers and listeners alike.  No photo or video could possibly capture the atmosphere of the evening.

After the concert was done and the conversations were released to their natural conclusions and the beautifully spread table was picked over of its fruits and sweets and cheeses, we loaded our car, headed back to the student family home, said goodbyes, stuffed children into their carseats, loaded a shocking amount of luggage back into our cars, and lumbered through the dark and stormy night back to Renton where we went through the unpleasantries of transferring crying and tired children to their beds and hauling the luggage inside to another pile of chaos before collapsing into bed. 

It was insane.  And we'd do it again in a heartbeat.