Allegro

When I was in third grade, all I wanted to do was take piano lessons.  My mom would ask what I wanted to do, soccer, gymnastics, whatever else kids sign up for, and all I begged for was to take piano lessons.  The glitch was that our family didn't have a piano.  It's not like buying a karate uniform or a basketball goal, but my parents started watching the classifieds.  I'm so grateful that they did that- how much easier would it have been to stop at "We don't have a piano!"?  Eventually they found a beautiful upright piano for sale at a small church.  I remember watching the piano get maneuvered out of the bed of a pick-up truck in our driveway.

I took piano lessons from fourth grade through high school.  Like anything, there are varying levels of intensity to piano lessons, from the concert pianist track to scheduling back to back lessons with your friend Kathleen so you can tell your piano teacher all about homecoming in between lessons.  My friend Kathleen did have the same piano teacher as I did, so guess which track I took.  

By a wonderful twist of perseverance and fate, I far outlasted my siblings in piano playing, each of them only lasting a few months or a year at most.  So when Trent and I moved into our house seven years ago, my parents gave us the piano.  The piano had never been tuned in all the years it sat at my parents house (I was the only one playing and they had already purchased a piano- how much more can you expect?) and after a trip down I-10 in the back of Brad and Dad Piano Movers's van, it sat largely unplayed still.  At that point it was vastly out of tune.  I kept meaning to call a piano tuner but we also kept having new kids arriving in our family.

But a few months ago I got a name of a piano tuner from a friend and called.  Was it even possible to tune an -almost- hundred year old piano that hadn't been tuned in at least 25 years?  He said he would look at it.  And he did.  He was a dream come true, spending almost twenty hours at our house doing repairs, replacing a broken key and a broken string, tightening things up and vacuuming out dust.  Through all the repairs, he warned us that there was a moderate possibility that the strings would just start snapping when he started tuning and he wouldn't be able to continue. 

I prayed that the strings wouldn't break, that the piano could be tuned.  And it was!  It is!  Just in time for piano lessons to start all over again, with Rush.   

What a pleasant surprise to remember that I can play the piano!  When my mom visited recently I pulled her into the room to demonstrate a sonata I once learned for a piano recital.  She remembered it and immediately had some kind of horrific flashback and left the room, implying that suffering through your children learning an instrument is possibly not one of the highlights of motherhood.  Hopefully knowing that all the money spent on lessons wasn't wasted outweighs the flashback.

I've been practicing everyday.  Practicing is equally encouraging and discouraging- I can see improvement, but also realize how many hours one would really have to devote to be flawless. The kids cry and yell, "not the piano!" and I just ignore them.  I looked up tips for memorizing music, and many people recommended practicing with distractions to make your brain go into a super focus mode.  Plus there's no set-up or take down, just walk into the room and sit down.  Finally, I've found a very compatible hobby to my line of work!

It's a new day in the Williams house, a new day!

Every Day in the Life

I found all these pictures on my phone, compliments of Tate, photojournalist.

  

There are Nike shirts that say:  365 EVERY DAMN DAY.  I'm going to get one.  But clearly not for sports or working out or whatever else Nike represents.

Little House, Again

There's a scene in the Little House books where someone gives the Ingalls family some chicks.  And Ma says something like, "We'll feed the chicks and they'll grow.  And after a year we'll have eggs.  Then after two years we'll have more chickens and more eggs.  And then in three years we can eat one of the chickens.  So in three years we'll have fried chicken, girls!"  Or maybe it was when they finally plant the garden (At Plum Creek?  Or on the prairie?) and they spend all year in joyful anticipation of finally getting to eat lettuce and onions.  Then they move.

Three years ago we planted a satsuma tree.  Last spring we had dozens of blossoms and tiny pea sized satsumas started to grow.  Then it was super windy and all were blown off the tree except for twelve satsumas.  And almost every time I've walked by that little tree all year long, I've counted those twelve satsumas to make sure they were still there.  And now, we're eating them.  And next year, God willing, the tree will grow.  And one year we'll eat satsumas and make satsuma cakes and send friends home with bags full of orange fruit.

Thankfully we've been able to purchase a variety of citrus fruits from the grocery store over the past few years, including right now.

Holly has a black eye from that villainous foe, the edge of the kitchen table.  She is modeling one of the dresses from her fall collection.  It was the same pattern that I used for the very first dress I made for her (which she never wore because it was oddly shaped) but this time the pattern was size XL.

CHOMP

"I'm so tired I could barf."  And yet...

The alligator was just to relax.  My mom is always finding driftwood and turning it into alligators; I think I inherited the alligator gene.

I have also started a new super secret project that I'm enjoying so far.  It's going to be a lot of sewing by hand, which will be good for squeezing into little bits of time. 

Everything I do ends up with a pile like that- in a good way.

35: Halfway to 70!

Fashion Update

It's great that I store boots and fleece and a pea coat all year long.   Because it's fall, I tried to wear boots yesterday, and I couldn't even make it through the whole day.  TOO HOT.  In other news, there are still bananas growing in our backyard.

Sunday after church I kicked off my heels under the kitchen table.  Monday night I put them on just to walk them upstairs to the closet.  Trent was like, "You look so nice!  You should dress like that every day!"  What I should be wearing every day is an apron and a head scarf.  

Maybe he can wear fancy shoes when he starts working on this situation:

No Rain

First things first:  Happy All Saints Day.  "They were all of them saints of God, and I mean, God helping, to be one too."

Remember yesterday?  Halloween.

Trunk or Treat was moved inside, but we can have a good time in an elementary filled with hundreds of kids and buckets of candy. 

Spending time with Tate while making his bat costume was one of the best parts of October.

There was no rain on Halloween.  

No wait, there was.  It rained almost all day, but stopped just in time to go trick or treating.  Then it rained again, on us, but we persevered and beat our previous distance record for trick or treating in our neighborhood.  Rush used the rainy afternoon to create a completely new costume for himself, ditching his vampire clothes to become Martin Kratt of the Wild Kratts.

It's hard not to love Halloween when people are dressed up and block partying and wandering the streets in the dark as it is actively raining.  The kids' shoes and socks were soaking wet, but hey, FREE CANDY!