Category Archives: Cello

Canada Day Concert Announcement!

You know the Canada Day concert is coming up, right?

On Friday July 1 the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra will be giving a free (yes, free!) concert as part of the overall Canada Day celebrations in conjunction with Pointe-Claire Village. We do this every year, and it’s always terrific fun. Our conductor is the justly famed Stewart Grant, who is phenomenal.

This year’s energetic programme features:

    Mozart: Magic Flute overture
    Schubert: Unfinished Symphony
    Strauss Jr: Emperor Waltz
    Strauss Sr: Radetzy March
    Strauss Jr: Pizzicato Polka
    Strauss Jr: Die Fledermaus overture

The concert begins at 20h00. As always, this Canada Day concert is being presented at St-Joachim church in Pointe-Claire Village, located right on the waterfront at 2 Ste-Anne Street, a block and a half south of Lakeshore Road. The 211 bus from Lionel-Groulx metro drops you right at the corner of Sainte-Anne and Lakeshore. Here’s a map to give you a general idea. I usually encourage those facing public transport to get together and coax a vehicle-enabled friend along by offering to buy them an ice cream or something. It works nicely, and it’s fun to go with a group. And hey, you can’t beat the price. Be aware that if you’re driving, parking will be at a premium because of the whole Canada Day festivities thing going on. Give yourself extra time to find a parking place and walk to the church, which will be packed with people.

As it’s a holiday, the village will be full of various celebrations, booths, food stalls, and the like. You might want to come early and enjoy what’s going on.

Free classical music! Soul-enriching culture! And as an enticing bonus, the fireworks are scheduled for ten PM, right after we finish, and the church steps are a glorious spot from which to watch them. Write it on your calendar, tell all your friends and family members! The more the merrier!

And a random observation: You know you’ve got just about a month to go before your baby’s born when you’ve extended the cello’s endpin as far as it can go to make a more pronounced angle so that the back of the instrument doesn’t lie on your bump, and as a result the fingerboard angle is all wrong and your shifts and basic intonation go into the toilet.

(Or maybe that’s just me.)

One more dress rehearsal! One more concert on Canada Day! And then I can hang my bow up and put my cello in its box stand till a couple of weeks after the baby is born. I just have to make it through the next ten days…

Potpourri

1. I had another prenatal appointment yesterday. Everything is spot-on. My doctor was so excited about me going past the 31-week mark that I had to laugh at her.

2. HRH has finished the stairs to the attic, and they are beautiful. He has also temporarily cleared out all the insulation so we can lay the floor. We have been able to revise the flooring plan because we discovered when he cut through the ceiling that the existing attic floor/first floor ceiling was made with tongue-and-groove strips, solid enough to be walked on. Seriously, this gets better and better; first, actual windows existed up there under the siding, and now a floor? The attic was genuinely designed to be another room that the original owners just didn’t tell the builders to complete.

3. After today, there are only two days of kindergarten left for the boy. He has a kindergarten celebration tomorrow afternoon, where the parents will go in and watch them sing songs and that sort of thing, then they will get certificates, and then there will be cake and juice for everyone. Where did this academic year go? Didn’t he just take the school bus for the first time?

4. As the end of the school year approaches the boy has been bringing home workbooks and folders and artwork. I had no idea they wrote and drew journals as part of their curriculum, but he sat down with me yesterday and read me all his journal entries, about one a week since they began in January, and I was stunned. They don’t teach formal reading or writing in kindergarten, or so they say; they encourage sounding things out and phonetic spelling as steps toward it. This means that yes, there are letters missing and incorrect letters, but the sounds are mostly there. I now have a six-year-old who sounds out every written word he sees with ease, reads above his theoretic grade level, and who does a pretty impressive job of writing words down just from listening to them or saying them. I can read his journal entries without referring to his teacher’s interpretation below. I find this kind of evolution of how to read and write absolutely fascinating. Here, here’s an example from two months ago; I’m giving you this one because I recognised it right away. This is a pretty precise depiction of Ceri and Scott’s basement from where you’d be standing if you paused in the archway into the TV room and saw Scott and Liam playing video games together. I even love that he drew Scott’s computer desk off to the right.

I also love that he wrote and drew about something important to him each time: spending the day with a special friend, building in his Lego City that lives on a board under his bed and is pulled out to play with, visiting grandparents, the best part of a field trip, and that sort of thing. We’re going to keep up the journal exercise weekly over the summer. He seems excited about it, it’s a great way to keep working on practising his letters, and I love the idea of tucking it away in a memento box for him to look at years from now.

(Have I mentioned that I find how kids learn fascinating? I do. I find the stuff they don’t learn just as fascinating. Like how the boy still can’t grasp riding a two-wheeler bike.)

5. I am currently struggling with internal tension about the postal strike. I fully support the CUPW’s right to demonstrate, call for collective bargaining, their requests for proper contracts and the pay scale and benefits they’re fighting to keep, including maintaining pension details for existing and new workers that got hit when the economy tanked. (It drives me up the wall that CP keeps saying mail volume is down and that’s why they’re not agreeing to the union’s requests to maintain what was in their last contract because they’re “unrealistic,” but they’re neglecting to acknowledge that to make up for it they’ve been accepting more paid admail to be delivered over the past few years, which has made up the shortfall in lettermail in both volume and profit. Admail; you know, the unaddressed stuff that the postperson sorts, carries, and puts in everybody’s mailbox that you take out and put right into the recycling box.) The one-day rotating strikes slowed things down a bit, but that was fine. When Canada Post cut operations to three days from five, effectively going to part-time for everyone, it slowed things down more and I chafed a bit, but at least things were still moving. But when Canada Post locked their workers out completely to create a national situation, things went badly for me. I have three (no, four by now) rather important freelance cheques coming to me from the US that are now stuck in the system. They were due to arrive the second week of June at the earliest, and we budgeted accordingly. Now that budget is screwed and have been scrambling to rebalance things; money originally scheduled to go one place is being diverted to go others and things are being left for a later date that ought to be paid now, and buying the last few baby things we need keeps getting shuffled later and later. The attic has taken a hit, too, because we were going to use part of my biggest cheque to buy the initial round of supplies, timed to happen with the beginning of the month-long vacation HRH had booked. (Although things look brighter in that department due to parental generosity, so at least HRH won’t be sitting here off work, twiddling his thumbs and wasting time, waiting for the cheques to arrive in the mail so we can get building.) So yes, things have been rather stressful and unhappy around here money-wise for the past two weeks. And just as bad, important outgoing mail got stuck in the strike as well, like our taxes and my application for cord blood donation, which needs to be received by Hema-Quebec before I get to 36 weeks. The life of a postal service-dependent freelancer is not a happy one. And it really annoys me to read comments like “We don’t need the post office, everyone should go to e-mail billing and direct deposit!” on news articles, because that demonstrates a really poor understanding of how businesses function (and also assumes everyone has internet access, which is also erroneous).

6. The boy went to La Ronde, our local Six Flags amusement park, for the first time this past Sunday, on a free pass with his best friend, her mum, and HRH. They had a fabulous time. I am shocked at the expense of these sorts of things, so a free pass is pretty much the only way it could happen. (Although HRH told me that season passes for a family are less expensive than a single admission for said family, if purchased before a certain date, so we may look into that as a gift to him next year since the boy had The Best Time Ever.) They spent the day mostly in the family ride area, the majority of which seems to have been installed in 2005. I am jealous, because he got to go on the Belgian carousel built in 1885 and bought for Expo 67, which runs on electricity right now but is being restored to run on steam power again, complete with its steam organ:

7. Tomorrow is the boy’s last day with his rental cello, then I take it back to the luthier. We couldn’t renew the rental even if we wanted to, with this stupid cheques-stuck-in-the-mail issue. But hopefully practice will be back to normal as of Tuesday morning, because on Monday we are taking that day trip to Ottawa to see secondhand 1/8 cello at a steal of a price, see the newly redone Nature Museum (which we last saw a couple of years ago in the midst of renovation) and also walk past the Parliament Buildings.

8. There’s a post with knitting and spinning and stuff to come, I promise.

I think that’s it for now.

In Which She Writes Up A Cello Recital Report For Posterity

A belated cello recital entry! I’ve been putting bits of this down as the week goes on. There’s been a lot to catch up on.

The boy went up to take his place with confidence, watched his teacher carefully, and played his piece with gusto. He got a big whoop at the end from all of the cello families, who know that the first recital is a big thing, and also from his godfamily who had just made it in time to hear him. (The grin on his face in the picture to the left is him hearing his godfamily, in fact.) The Suzuki mum in me is very proud of his confidence in his bowing and his poise. The cellist in me is very proud of how good his sound was – no wishy-washy sound from this boy! – and of his steady rhythm. In the interest of full disclosure, his piece was a pre-Twinkle piece called ‘Carnival in Rio’ from Joanne Martin’s Magic Carpet for Cello, a series of pieces that use the Twinkle bowing variation #1 on the open A string, so he was focusing on rhythm and sound alone, not fingering. This was, you may remember, a last-minute change from his descending scale pattern with the same bowing, AKA ‘The Monkey Song,’ which he’d been preparing; his teacher asked if he’d be more comfortable playing a duet with her instead of playing alone. It was a perceptive and sensitive suggestion, and I think the substitution was very successful in building his confidence in his ability to survive and enjoy a recital. I’m so thankful he had a positive first experience.

As for my own piece, I have never been so pleased with a recital performance before. I played the first two movements of the ‘Suite Française’ by Paul Bazelaire, a piece that no one knows, but let me tell you, a bunch of cellists asked both me and my teacher for the music after the dress rehearsal and the concert! My teacher introduced it to me during our last chamber orchestra session, where she showed me how to pizz an arpeggio or double-stop with the thumb away from me, then immediately hook back with the forefinger to catch the quick note following. She demonstrated with the series of pizz chords and single notes in the first movement of the Bazelaire, then played a bit of the theme for me. It’s a piece she played back when she was studying at school; she said that I might really enjoy playing the whole thing, perhaps for the recital, and we looked it over at our next lesson and decided it suit my study very well for a variety of reasons. (Cellofamily: If you’re interested, the first two movements are also found in Carey Cheney’s Solos series, in book four, I think.) I love this whole suite; it’s kind of stompy, which is a style I do not usually play, and it has some terrific folksy themes. I was planning to do the first, second, and fifth movements, but we ran out of time to properly prepare the fifth.

The ensemble pieces had ups and downs. Four of us pulled off the ‘Elfintanz’ from Cheney vol. 2 as a tight ensemble piece, which was fun. The Goltermannn ‘Romance,’ in which I played first cello, sounded okay to me when I was playing it (possibly because I was focusing so hard on my part, which wasn’t terrific but was passable), but came off as a garbled tangle in the recording, one of the perils of live performance where your ears tell you one thing and the more balanced recording tells you another. The Schubert ‘Impromptu’ arrangement was okay. The pieces that brought in the younger kids were better: ‘A la Claire Fontaine’ was lovely, for example. After missing his entrance cue in the previous kids-only canon song because his eyes were wandering, the boy played air cello or open strings in this one, swaying back and forth as he watched his teacher play, and it was really charming to see how into it he got. The video shows him looking back over his shoulder at me to see how he was doing in this piece and me smiling back at him, something I would have forgotten if it hadn’t been captured on film. (He may have missed his cue in the canon preceding it because his eyes were wandering, but also possibly because his partner, a six-year-old girl, had fallen asleep on the front pew of the church during the adult solos, and didn’t appear in the ensemble half of the concert as scheduled; they had partially relied on one another during the dress rehearsal for their entrance cue.) The finale was a full ensemble of Joanne Martin’s ‘Calypso’ from More Folk Strings in which the boy played percussion, counting and watching his teacher very carefully.

We were thrilled to have most of the special people and families he’d invited to his debut there. Thanks go out to both sets of grandparents, the Preston-LeBlancs, Marc Mackay, and Marc Leguen for sharing the experience with us and cheering him on. I have to thank my dad for taking pictures (these are all his), HRH for videoing parts of the recital, and Scott for lending us his digital video recorder for the purpose, too.

We are tremendously proud of our boy. Most of the time he was cheerful about the whole idea of the recital, but a couple of times he had small crises of self-confidence and worried about what would happen because he had no idea what to expect from the experience, or indeed any kind of similar experience to which to compare it. In fact, at his second to last lesson he got upset when I moved to sit in front of him and pretended to be the audience, because that wasn’t where I usually sat. We switched things up at home after that, playing in the kitchen, for example, to show him that you could play anywhere and didn’t need to rely on the same setup in the same places every time. The group dress rehearsal on the day before the recital was very helpful too, because he sat and listened to all the other kids do their pieces as well. (Group lessons have been fabulous for him. He so admires the older girls he’s watched grow from book 1 pieces into book 2; in fact, when they brought out their Suzuki books and tucked them under their chairs for reference if necessary during the last group lesson, he instructed me to do the same with his book, despite the fact that we’re pre-Twinkle and don’t use book 1 yet.)

I love helping him discover things. We took Monday off from cello practice and let him sleep in a bit after a later bedtime on Sunday night, but Tuesday morning I gave him his ten-minute call for cello. “I thought cello was over,” he said, puzzled. Ah, no, small child! If you take the entire summer off, you will be very, very upset in September when lessons begin again and you have to start from scratch! So he played a couple of exercises, and then I set him a musical riddle. I told him to play his Twinkle bowing variation #1 on the D string; then again on the A string; then to put one finger down on the A to play it on a B (which he has already encountered in an exercise); then to play his Monkey song, which is a descending four-note pattern of G, F#, E, D on the D string, with the same bowing rhythm. He repeated the sequence aloud to make sure he had it correctly, then played it. “Congratulations,” I said. “You’ve just played the first two lines of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’” I thought his eyes were going to fall out of his head. “I didn’t know I could do that!” he said.

This has been a wonderful introduction to music-making for him, I think. Not every five-year-old will cheerfully settle down for fifteen minutes of practice every morning at seven-thirty before school (most days it’s cheerfully, anyhow!). He may get discouraged sometimes and say it’s hard because he can’t match what’s in his head, and he wishes he’d never started, or when he forgets about his left elbow being up a bit when he’s focusing on his right one dropping, but you know what? Learning any new instrument is hard, and you still have trouble with those little things after years and years (and years) of playing. I wish I could explain to him how much he has already learned, all the tiny muscle movements and balancing and timing required to just get sound out of the instrument, and get him to understand how proud he should be that he has come this far already. Although he did say “I am very proud in myself” with well-deserved satisfaction when we asked him how he felt after the recital, so maybe he does have some idea. And he is very, very excited about the possibility of acquiring his very own cello for him to keep always, too.

Away Time

I am swamped with work and countdown to this weekend’s recital, so I haven’t been here and won’t really be for the next week, either. I’m late on my Books Read in May roundup, and that has to wait, too. Short form:

– Lovely weather, but as is expected the humidity rising, so there are good days and bad days.

– The boy turns six on Saturday, and has a school field trip to a local national park for frog and butterfly exploration on Friday. They had caterpillars in class to observe in the latter half of May, and the kids saw them make chrysalises and hatch into beautiful Painted Lady butterflies, which the class released last week. Very exciting.

– The boy finally realised what playing in a recital meant at his lesson last Saturday, and there were some tears because it would be different from his usual environments of lessons and home practice. His teacher worked with him sensitively and they changed his piece to a duet with her; we also scheduled him to be second, so he isn’t playing first and alone.

– Owlet is doing fine, and passed her brother’s gestational record of 31w2d this past weekend. Go Owlet! I am exhausted and in pain a lot of the time, which isn’t a surprise considering the stupid amount of growth that was accomplished in a very short time on top of my pre-existing fibro and scoliosis issues.

– Also this weekend, there were suddenly a half-flight of stairs, a landing, and a big hole in the ceiling to the attic. Next up: Plywood floor, framing walls, vapour barrier and ventilation layer, lifting insulation, plasterboard. Windows have to be installed in there somewhere, and wiring run to be certified by an electrician.

– Did I mention I am swamped with work? I handed in the copyediting gig, but now it is all bird book rewrites all the time, and I am having panic attacks at the amount of work that needs to be done by Friday night. Technically I have to hand it in on Monday morning at 8 or 9 AM, but I won’t be able to work on it all weekend because of dress rehearsal, guests, birthday party, and recital, so Friday’s the deadline.

– We have a lead on a secondhand 1/8 cello for the boy at an insanely low price. It’s in Ottawa, so we’ll trundle down there for a day trip the last week of June and check it out, as well as visiting the redone Museum of Nature and walking through the Parliament buildings. Even if it needs new strings and a bow rehair (both of which I fully expect) it will still be less expensive than the other secondhand one listed here in Montreal.

Right; back into the fray. Wish me sanity and an even head.

Owlet Update

I booked all of yesterday off, because the past few appointments I’ve had have taken more than all morning, and trying to squeeze scheduled work in after that and before the boy got home was just stressing me out. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and hot but with a decent breeze to offset the growing humidity. I dare say I’d have been less happy about it if the maternity wing of my hospital wasn’t air conditioned, but it is, so I spent the morning in relative comfort.

This time my wait was only an hour and a half long, and my appointment was very positive. Owlet has done some serious work, growing five weeks’ worth in two weeks (hello, 30-week growth spurt). She went from being three weeks behind to bang on target, all of her measurements coming in at an average of 30w5d (which was a day shy of where we were). She has shifted from a transverse position to head-down, and the placenta is in awesome shape and position. She weighs about 1658 grams, which is almost exactly what the boy weighed when he was born. My body is still showing zero signs of potential labour. “Congratulations,” my doctor said as she started to put the monitors away. “You are officially no longer considered a high-risk pregnancy. Keep doing what you’re doing, because it’s obviously working.”

I am no longer considered high-risk! WOO-HOO!

All the good vibes (thanks, everyone!), bed rest, progesterone treatment, and extra ice cream have obviously worked. This is wonderful news for me, because as of today I’m at 31 weeks, the precise point where things went wrong last time with the boy. The “keep doing what you’re doing” instruction is rather key, though, so I’m keeping to the reduced activity. She didn’t tell me light bed rest was off the schedule, so I’m not throwing myself back into running around with the boy and doing grocery shopping or extended errands again.

While I was there, I made an appointment for a hospital tour in three weeks. I’m excited about it, because this is one of those lacunae in my experience. I mean, I’m very familiar with the high-risk clinic, and the ultrasound rooms, the first contact emergency area, and their nursery where the boy was transferred after his stay in NICU, but nothing else. They gave me a choice of June 26 or July 24, and maybe it’s just me, but July 24 felt like cutting it a wee bit close for comfort. So I’ll finally get to see my hospital’s labour and delivery rooms.

I got home around noon and managed to get an hour and a half of work done before I had to stop. See? Scheduling the day off and getting work done anyway feels like a major bonus or score somehow, like finding billable hours where you didn’t think there were any. I also made myself sit down and do an hour of heavy work on all my cello recital pieces, since work and bed rest had my practice record rather, erm, spotty in the two previous weeks and my performance at the group class last Sunday showed it. And once the boy got home, I finished spinning the first half of the BFL/silk for the lace cap, too, and started the second half. So it was a remarkably productive day.

I also went to orchestra last night for the first time after missing two weeks, and it was a wonderful evening. We were in a different rehearsal location, and it was very pleasant. We could never afford it on a regular basis, but it would be nice if we could. It’s where the youth orchestra practices, and when our conductor called break he encouraged us to engage in one of their rituals, heading to the local parlour on the corner to indulge in homemade ice cream. It would have been lovely, but rushed, and my wallet was also empty. And besides, the celli were all comforting one of our section, who slipped on the stairs on the way up the stars to the rehearsal room and smashed his cello.

I’m achy this morning, which is totally understandable, since I did more yesterday than I have done in ages. I also didn’t sleep very well, because the windstorm that blew down trees and power lines yesterday (and our metal gazebo in the backyard, which I am fervently hoping is salvageable) rattled our bedroom window all night and there was a cat bent on waking us up at all hours with aggressive purring in the face. I think I can just about finish the copyediting assignment I have today, though, since I hit roughly the halfway point yesterday. I can certainly get close enough to the end that I can wrap it up and probably send it back tomorrow (yay, more invoicing), leaving me all of next week for the bird book rewrites. I may leave myself open for one more copyediting assignment, but then I’ll book off for a couple of months and initialize my QPIP maternity benefits (which became available to self-employed workers the year after I had the boy, thank you, Quebec… although they don’t make it easy to figure it all out if you don’t get tax receipts, which I don’t, as I’m paid freelance from the US; I’ll be using the last two years of net income as reported on my taxes as source numbers).

Today: Thirty-one weeks of pregnancy. Between five and nine to go.

Mother’s Day Roundup And Other Mothery Stuff

This morning the boy picked up his bow and bowed his fingering exercise. He’d been playing it pizzicato till now, saying that no no no, the bow would be too hard. Today he decided to do it all on his own. I am learning so much about the way he learns by working through his practices with him. And we share experiences, too, like today when we were talking about pivots to cross strings, and he said, “I kept my right wrist really, really still Mama.” I agreed, and said, “You know how your teacher said grown-up cellists still have problems with not moving their bow hand wrists and letting their right elbows direct the movement instead? Mama still has lots and lots of trouble with that.” (Mama was also taught to use her wrist and keep it loose in order to economize energy, as was our current teacher, so we’re both working on remembering otherwise; you can see how teaching and playing styles change over the years.) “Really?” he said. “I won’t! When I grow up, I won’t move my wrist at all!”

I love that we share this together. I love that I can hear him humming bits of my recital pieces when I work on them, both during my lesson and when I practice at home, and even at random times when he’s building with Lego or playing with action figures. I love that he’ll play an exercise for me without announcing it and then ask me impishly if I can identify it, and he’s so chuffed when I do. He counts his practice stickers every morning before putting another one on, and it looks like we may hit 100 right around recital time (very exciting!).

He was so excited about Mother’s Day that I got my school artwork on Thursday when he brought it home, a construction paper daffodil and two heart-shaped cards. I was awoken on Saturday morning at 5:45 by a gentle pat and a whispered “Happy Mother’s Day, Mama,” because he couldn’t wait for that, either. On Sunday morning at 7:00 I got another drawing of a heart, and then a silver tray with a cup of tea and a small bouquet of tulips and daffodils from the garden. We’d invited HRH’s parents over for lunch, so I made that lovely cinnamon loaf and a quiche, and my mother-in-law contributed salad and crudités, and fruit to go with the cinnamon loaf for dessert. The food was all lovely, and we sat outside afterwards as the weather was spectacular. I managed to get sun, as the freckles testify. HRH and his dad (who is looking really, really fantastic and recovering well from his bout of very bad health) got to wander around upstairs and bounce ideas for finishing the attic off one another, and ended up on a recon mission to the Home Depot three blocks down that resulted in two perfect windows being brought home, much to everyone’s surprise.

Monday was a ped day. What? You say you thought the boy just had several? So did we. It was marked as conditional on the school calendar, which I didn’t check till this weekend, and I didn’t get an announcement or confirmation from the school beforehand so I went ahead and assumed it was happening. As I’d already put off my second round of blood tests and the glucose challenge test once from last week when I had the dizzy spells, instead of rescheduling it yet again the boy came with me to the hospital yesterday, and his mission was to take care of me. He was very interested in the cold orange drink I was given and asked what it tasted like. I said, “Like melted orange popsicles, with a bit of fizzy to it” and he made a face. We hung out in the snack bar for the hour it took for the glucose test, where he nibbled on the carrots and snow peas we’d brought, and we read a bunch of books. Then we went back to the lab and he held my hand very importantly while they took the blood so that I wouldn’t be afraid. The technicians thought he was adorable for patting my arm and telling me that it wouldn’t hurt and it would be over in just a moment. We came home and had a picnic lunch in the backyard.

I’m starting to feel a little weird. I’m at 27 weeks, and at the hospital they gave me a test to be done at home at 35 weeks. I had my first baby at 31 weeks, six years ago; I don’t know what happens normally after that, what tests are done, when appointments are scheduled. I missed two-thirds of my final trimester, so I have no idea what to expect from it. I’m in the weird position of having experienced labour and delivery, but not in the way I’d expected in the hospital I’d worked with up till that point; I never got to pack a bag or plan out what to do to keep my mind busy in labour, or anything like that. I’ve never even had a hospital tour. I’ve never had my brand new infant in my hospital room with me, or got to take it home with me when I left. It’s all new for me from hereon in till the baby arrives home, at which point I’m back in familiar territory. (I have plenty of experience in dealing with NICU, though, and pumping exclusively for a month to supply my baby with breastmilk, and in dealing with hospital staff and schedules of all kinds.) It’s just a really odd feeling to have this lacuna ahead of me between the two sections of pregnancy/new mum stuff that I know about. I sometimes feel like an imposter when first-time-pregnant women of my acquaintance ask me about the last trimester and new babies. My experience is so different from the norm.

Speaking of this baby, she is really working the kickboxing routine these days. I can’t find a comfortable position for my very adjustable desk chair and the yoga ball I got somehow manages to stress my lower back more rather than less, both of which make for a challenging work sessions. I may ask HRH to get the kneeling chair out of storage; that might work.

The State Of The Boy

My son woke me up at 5:45 this morning to tell me that his second very loose baby tooth had fallen out during the night. Apparently he woke up, felt it was missing, and immediately looked under his pillow for his coin. I think our wake-up had more to do with the fact that he couldn’t find his tooth and didn’t have financial proof that the Tooth Fairy had taken it than excitement about the tooth falling out. (He found the tooth in his sheets later.)

Although since we were awake I switched the TV on at 6:00 and we watched the royal wedding, which I hadn’t seriously planned to do. I listened to him make interested comments about the male guests’ hairlines (?), all the shiny medals on the uniforms (he was most impressed by the Duke of Edinburgh, although he kept calling him the king and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t the king if he was married to the queen; we missed a lot of the ceremony trying to explain this, as well as the concept of the Commonwealth and how the queen was technically our queen as well, even though Canada is an independent nation), the abbey layout, and the ceremony itself (this was, I believe, this first Christian ceremony he’s ever observed, so there were lots of questions about why they were saying certain things and who was who and what they were each doing, and so forth). He was very pleased that the prince was called William. “It’s a very special day,” he said. “I lost a tooth, and they’re getting married!” Then I got to remind him that we could watch the Endeavour launching this afternoon when he gets home from school, and I thought he was going to burst.

He’s such a cheerful kid. He drives me to distraction sometimes, but on the whole I’m horrendously proud of him, and what’s more, I like him as a person. There’s a world of difference between loving your child and liking him. I like how he thinks, how he experiments, how he talks, and how he laughs. He’s an interesting, likeable person.

He is genuinely excited about the baby, makes suggestions about things to buy for her or plans for things to do with her, and hugs her a lot. In fact, there have been several times lately where he has thrown his arms around my waist and I put my arms around him to hug him back, and he has said, “No, Mama, I’m not hugging you, I’m hugging the baby.” A couple of weeks ago I said that the baby’s hearing was getting so good that she could hear us talking now. “Really?” he said, then leaned over close to my abdomen and said, “Hello in there!” I thought HRH was going to choke on his laughter in the kitchen. The six-year gap between them initially concerned me a bit, but I think he’s really at a wonderful age to help take care of her, and also to understand that we’re going to be a bit preoccupied this summer and fall. Understand does not equate like, of course. And I recognise that the reality of a new baby may be different from whatever it is that he’s envisioning at the moment. But overall, the general consensus is that he’s going to make a terrific big brother.

He turns six in six weeks. All the long-sleeve t-shirts we bought him at the beginning of the school year are now two inches too short for his arms. In order to get pants that are long enough for his legs we have to use styles that have the adjustable buttoned elastic at the waists and cinch them as tightly as we can. His weight doesn’t seem to to have budged; he’s just stretched all over instead. I know his shoe size increased by one this winter. I think he’s hazily planning three birthday parties: one for family, one for school friends, and one for his grown-up friends. His actual birthday weekend will consist of the family party, and then the next day is his very first recital. We didn’t think he’d be doing a solo, just playing in the ensemble pieces, but our teacher is considering having him play his most recent exercise, and I think he’s quite excited about it. (He reserves the right to change his mind, though, which I am also fine with. I’m the one who lays out the programme, after all.)

I stopped by the luthier to renew the rental for his cello for another two months, which will take us a couple of weeks past the recital. I am, I have to say, very proud of how conscientious he is about sitting down at 7:30 each morning to run through at least three exercises, and how much he generally looks forward to it. I’ve noticed that it takes him about two weeks to process a new exercise: the first week he’ll refuse to do it each day, then the next week he’ll try it the first day, attempt to propose an alternative arrangement or adjustment it on the second, then settle in to do it properly the last few days. We’re working on stopping the D string with fingers now, which is huge, and his resistance has been more stubborn than usual for this exercise because it doesn’t make a nice sound yet. Stopping the strings is hard: it takes a lot of focused finger strength without clamping the neck between thumb and fingers, which is especially hard for young fingers, and when you try to combine it with pizzicato or bow movement things fall apart very easily. I have the deepest respect for Suzuki parents who don’t play an instrument, because practice sessions with the child are very involved with lots of supervision. I have no idea how I’d be handling it if I didn’t play the cello already. A while ago my online friend and fellow cellist Michael Tuchman said that if you’re discouraged about your progress, try showing a beginner how to make a simple sound with your instrument and you’ll see how much you’ve already internalized about the minute adjustments and balances required to play. When I have my cello out with the boy, I remember how hard it was to keep all my teacher’s instructions in mind at the beginning, how I couldn’t coordinate the bow and my left hand at the same time (I played pizzicato for at least three months before learning how to use the bow), and now I can do all sorts of things. I see this in orchestra, too, as we play orchestral pieces I played in the earlier years: I now fly through pieces that had me totally stumped at the beginning. (Strauss’ Kaiser Waltz is one of these; it was such a headache because it was so high when I first played it, but I sight-read it without much trouble at all the other week.) It’s hard to communicate that to a child who’s encountering hard basics, though.

My dad asked me a few questions about the Suzuki method while we were visiting last weekend, and I didn’t quite get the drift of what he was aiming at until I’d slept on it for a few days. The Suzuki method isn’t designed to produce professional musicians; it’s designed to introduce music into daily vocabulary, to communicate the basics of music theory and technique, and instill a love for making it in people. There’s the common misconception that Suzuki kids don’t learn how to read music but just reproduce what they hear on recordings, which is entirely untrue (otherwise there wouldn’t be Suzuki music books, now, would there?). The Suzuki method urges listening to music of all kinds, making it a part of daily experience. It also teaches methods of application and focus, which are kind of the same reasons why a lot of employers write up job listings and ask for people with a degree of some kind, any kind: they want to know that you’ve learned how to schedule and concentrate and apply yourself in a structured environment. Music lessons of any sort teach that kind of discipline, and I think we’re already seeing the benefits of the few months he’s had of lessons in the boy’s approach to things in general. In the same way that registering your kid for community soccer doesn’t mean he’s training for a pro career but is great experience anyway, the Suzuki method gives a child the chance to explore a whole bunch of stuff, including cooperation and learning to follow instruction and how to work on specific techniques to accomplish certain goals, all with the bonus of fostering a love for music. Applied to adults, it’s a different but not-unrelated kettle of fish. There’s a reason why the method is also described as a teaching philosophy: there’s the noted absence of negative feedback, with support for what you did right instead, then looking for a way to improve what can be improved. I beat myself up enough about getting things wrong; I don’t need a teacher to add to that. What I need is a positive, constructive environment that points out what I did right, and that’s one of the tenets of the Suzuki philosophy. The reading I’ve done on the method reminds me that as a parent, pointing out the negative things often isn’t as constructive as reinforcing the positive things and then reframing what needs improvement. Is it more work? Yes. Is it more beneficial in the long run? I certainly think so. I also find the theory that children can learn music by being exposed to it the same way the learn language fascinating, which was one of Suzuki’s original concepts when designing the method.

When I get my delivery cheque for the bird book, one of the things we will do is find him a secondhand cello, because that will be cheaper than continuing to rent. He is quite excited by this idea, too, and said, “Thank you, Mama,” when I mentioned it to him the other day. Have I mentioned that I like this kid? I think we’re doing okay with him. I suspect that any parent who has managed to produce a kid who requests broccoli on a regular basis has a reason to pat themselves on the back.

ETA: Drat, the Endeavour has been delayed 48 hrs over failed heater somethings. Boo.