02.20.08
Posted in Homeschooling, Household, Kids, Music at 10:11 am by Christina
Trying to get back into the habit of keeping friends and family informed about our lives, I’m going to share for you what our Wednesdays are like these days.
It’s a sleep-in morning for us, after a very early Tuesday; the girls’ theater troupe performs in schools Tuesday mornings, so we’re up by 7am usually. Yesterday it was 6! One of the things we love best about homeschooling is the limited use of alarm clocks (aided by the home business as well), the ability to be on our own natural rhythms.
At 10:30 Emma and I leave for her one-hour harp lesson, leaving Jamie at home with Jeff and Katie. I would like for this to not require me, for Jamie and I to be able to go to the nearby park; as a beginning harpist at 8, though, it is helping for me to be sitting in on the lessons to take notes and to understand myself what is going on.
We get home at 12:30 for lunchtime. Wednesdays are our “hot lunch” day to balance the picnic dinner (keep reading for that one). We are on a four-week meal rotation, which includes two bulk cooking meals each week. Weeks 1/3 and 2/4 I freeze a meal-sized portion to eat for hot lunch on the opposite week. Then on Wednesday mornings I do any prep work so that Jeff and Katie can put the final touches on a meal that’s ready when we get home. Today, we’re having pesto pasta, so I have to toast pine nuts and prep cauliflower for steaming; then Jeff and Katie will cook the pasta and cauliflower before we get home and we’ll eat.
We only have an hour before we head out again, this time for the rest of the day. Wednesdays are our music day from top to bottom. At 1:30 we head over to San Leandro, where I drop Katie and Emma off for their violin lessons. They bring their backpacks along and work at the teacher’s dining room table while the other is in lesson. Jamie and I go to a nearby park (unless he’s fallen asleep; but naptime is usually delayed if he’s in the car).
We pick the girls up at 3:30 and have an hour before Katie’s flute lesson starts. (The afternoon takes place in three neighboring towns.) Jamie usually falls asleep at this point, and I take the girls to another park for half an hour of fresh air and exercise. Last time they jumped off the swings for the entire thirty minutes!
At 4:15 we begin the overlap shuffle. First to Katie’s flute lesson, where she is dropped off for a 4:30 start time. Then a quick drive to Emma’s 4:45 orchestra start time. Back to Katie’s 5:00 pickup! We don’t have to be back at orchestra for Katie until 5:45, so occasionally I run an errand (like a Trader Joe’s stop for Jamie’s milk) before going back. Katie eats her picnic dinner during this interval.
Emma likes to stay to observe Katie’s orchestra (I think actually she enjoys the video games and DVD players that other siblings there have). Jamie likes to play in the van. I usually have a book along to read. The rest of us eat our picnic dinner while Katie is in orchestra.
This next bit is not happening today, because my choral auditions are finished and we don’t know which pieces were selected; most groups won’t get back into rehearsals until March anyway, so I’ve a couple of weeks off. Except for these breaks, what usually happens is that Jeff meets us at orchestra at 6:45 and I leave for my 7:00 rehearsal. Jeff hangs with Jamie until Katie is done at 7:15, and then they all head for home.
Whew! It doesn’t usually feel as crazy as it looks all written out, and although it is a lot of time on the road in a time when we are working to conserve gas and otherwise reduce our footprint, I remind myself that I am driving for a family and that I made an effort to access activities that were located as locally as possible. Most of the afternoon happens in a six-mile corridor.
This is hands-down our busiest day of the week. (Thank goodness!)
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09.10.07
Posted in Kids, Music at 8:41 am by Christina
Today we are going on a very special outing! Emma has been very patient, waiting through the busy summer, to exchange her (June) birthday coupon for the real thing, and we are taking the next step today toward starting her HARP lessons! She is thrilled, although she’s cranky that she won’t actually drive home with a harp to enjoy immediately… There is a harp store about 30 minutes from us; we’re going in for an hour-long “experience” session I guess you’d call it. The owner-harpist will work with her on different instruments and help us decide which instrument would be best. Emma’s choir director is a Celtic harpist and has already given us her recommendation, but she won’t be Emma’s private teacher because she lives too far away and has no openings, either. So Emma, grandma Meemom and I are heading off today to get things arranged! We are turning out to be quite a musical family: Katie and Emma are on violin and choir together, plus flute and harp respectively; I wonder what Jamie will pick up? He’s already matching voice to piano, which is really cool to see!
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08.29.07
Posted in Family, Household, Kids, Music, Singing at 7:04 pm by Christina
Well, we just returned home from a terrific weekend in Los Angeles with family! As soon as we got home, we dialed in to the theater casting line to hear the final selections for the Oliver! cast – and both girls were in the final children’s ensemble! Our fall will be as full as we can handle; they’re both super-excited and can’t wait for the first cast meeting this Saturday…
Back to the unpacking!
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06.23.07
Posted in Household, Kids, Music, Travel at 10:37 pm by Christina
We picked Katie up from her music sleep-away camp today, enjoying a wonderful concert in the process as the kids performed the culmination of their music work-play of the week. Katie was thrilled to see us, and had a terrific time there. She made friends easily, made music in an orchestra about ten times the size of her homeschool one, slept out under the stars every night… The food seemed to be consistently “gross” by her estimation but she apparently ate it. (It was prepared by the counseling staff; I don’t know if there was a kitchen supervisor or not…) She definitely wants to return next year; whether it will be the one-week or two-week program will be determined at a later date. Emma is hoping she’ll get to go next year as well! The location was gorgeous, along a creek and surrounded by coniferous forest, and the facilities looked nice too. The camp actually offers a “family camp” program, a four- or five-day weekend affair, near the end of the summer. Had I known about it earlier I might have arranged for us all to go and make music together!
We are together now to celebrate Emma’s 8th birthday tomorrow. My mother is back (having needed to return to Spokane for a couple of nights to deal with a flooded basement) and my brother arrived this morning as well to celebrate with us; we always love seeing them both. The girls are actually sharing a birthday party tomorrow at the pool; they shared a significant present in January around Katie’s birthday when they traveled to Spokane for the U.S. figure skating championships, and we decided not to have a non-family party for Katie at the time. I’ve got two cakes going in the oven, and a decorating theme all picked out as well based on their family nicknames. It will be a busy day tomorrow as I’ve warm-ups and auditions in the late morning (last day, thank goodness!), and I’m really glad the party is not here at the house…
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06.17.07
Posted in Homeschooling, Household, Kids, Life in general, Music, Travel at 10:21 am by Christina
This has been an incredibly busy stretch for us and the most recent “big push” is just about over:
- I have been rehearsing like crazy for ensemble auditions for my chorus; six of them are done now and just two left next Sunday.
- The girls have been in their final push at chorus, which culminated with two concerts this week: Friday’s lunchtime community concert at Stanford Hospital, and Saturday’s evening performance for friends and family.
- Jeff left at the crack of dawn today (happy Father’s Day!) for the Drug Information Association trade show in Atlanta. He is going as a techical consultant for the company that bought the Ninaza technology he developed. Even so, it’s a great opportunity for him to network the new consulting business; the last week has therefore been filled with preparatory work on that front (business cards, website, plus work with a friend who is a professional coach) on top of the regular work.
- Katie leaves for her first sleep-away camp at the crack of dawn tomorrow. She’s going to a music camp north of San Francisco, and she is beyond excited about it. As soon as she came downstairs this morning she wanted me to help her organize her packing list so she could get started. Her excitement is pretty contagious; still, I’m apprehensive that she will experience an anxiety attack tonight, or worse, tomorrow morning en route to or at the camp bus in Berkeley. I’ve been doing my best to be proactive on this front, initiating numerous discussions over the last few weeks to get her feelings and thoughts out in the open; maybe that approach will end up being successful and my apprehension will be all for naught!
- Emma also starts camp tomorrow; hers is a science day camp at a local park on the topic “Gizmos and Gadgets”. She’s excited to do that, make some new friends, and also use her new lunchbox and backpack. (We lost her backpack in the move, and I’d managed to consistently use her matching lunchbox as Jamie’s milk cooler, which made it a bit smelly from leaks and so forth. We got her a new light blue with pandas set from L.L. Bean; about three days after it came, the old backpack turned up…)
Is there more? Of course!
- Our new maple bookshelves came this week. Jeff and I had hoped to get more done on that front, but the business responsibilities took precedence. All six shelves (three paperback, three regular) are still in their packaging in the front room. I ordered a custom stamp from VistaPrint.com for the Sonas Family Library, which we’ll use to stamp the books as we catalogue them at LibraryThing.com. Once Jeff is back from DIA he is trying to schedule a week of minimal business tasks and we’ll work on this project as a family then.
- The kids and I made a fun trip to IKEA on Monday while Jeff was at a business meeting nearby. Our goal? Gorm shelves for the homeschool room. We used the previous version of these shelves in our kitchen and garage at the old house (left those there) and we also used the big drawer units in the playroom for stuffies, dolls and pillows (we brought these along with us). Those were all the 20″ deep units; for the study we bought 12′ by 6′ of the 12″ deep shelves to hold all the homeschooling and arts/crafts supplies. I think I’ll be able to organize things more by topic than they have been. For example, a geography shelf that has the globe, atlases and other geography books. This is my project to work on this week during camp time. (We also had a bonus find at IKEA of collapsible trunks for the girls. They are part of this line but really look like a trunk, with a velcro padlock and everything! These were a great find for the girls, who began unpacking their Hogwarts cardboard-box-trunks as soon as we got home. The new trunks are constructed with a zip-out bottom, so they are fully collapsible for storage. They’ll definitely see a lot of use here!)
I would have a hard time tackling this level of stuff with Jeff gone, but my parents came down yesterday for the choir concert and my mother is staying the week. (Next weekend are Katie’s camp concert, the girls’ joint birthday party, and Emma’s actual birthday.) I talked with her about my hopes for productivity, and we decided that we would use the hours Emma is at camp (930-230 after the driving) for me to work on the homeschooling project. After we get Emma home from camp, we’ll do more “together” kinds of things. Hopefully that pattern will work; we need to see what Emma’s energy level is like in the late afternoons. If she’s too wiped, Mom and I may change our approach to do more active stuff during the camp hours (walks, bike rides, park outings with Jamie) and I’ll do the shelving in the afternoons. And even though Mom will be getting plenty of time with Jamie, I’ll almost certainly still do naptimes; I’ve always found that the key to getting good stretches of time away from the kids is to make sure they are tanked up with connection at other times!
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05.23.07
Posted in Homeschooling, Kids, Music at 1:37 pm by Christina
I don’t know how to have these actually play in a box inside the post, but one step at a time, right? Clicking on the links below will open a QuickTime movie; when it’s done, you’ll have to navigate back to the blog with the back arrow.
The girls had the final homeschool orchestra concert of the 2006-07 year last week. Emma decided to do the folk song 500 Miles as a solo. She had no sheet music for this; she made the arrangement totally on her own, even getting it in an appropriate key for a beginning violinist (D major). (I’m not sure why her dress wigs in and out of phase; it’s quite a dress though, all orange and black and neon stripes…)
Katie also chose a song with no sheet music: Heart & Soul (the traditional four hand piano piece). She wanted to invite a group of three sisters to do it in parts with herself and Emma, plus it also needed to be written up in D major (which she could do on the piano). She worked with me to arrange it in PrintMusic, which is the software I use for all my chorus work. (Unfortunately, the song was a bit longer than the 75 seconds my camera allows for video; a digital video camera is on my to-do list for researching and purchasing!)
Finally, Jamie. We have short videos of him because we haven’t gotten a working video camera yet; Katie especially likes to video him and this clip was captured by her: Jamie Jumping
I hope you enjoy these!
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05.04.07
Posted in Blogs, Humor, Music at 12:44 pm by Christina
This is absolutely hysterical: Pachelbel Rant
Thanks to Mommy Brain, who regularly posts Friday Links.
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04.26.07
Posted in Music, Singing at 8:08 am by Christina
Last night I enjoyed a night on the town while my much-appreciated partner Jeff held the home-fort down with the kids. (This in the middle of a very busy work stretch – he’s not been getting much sleep lately, but the karaoke has been scheduled for a while!)
I drove a couple of towns over to rendezvous with friends from chorus at a bar, which is not the sort of place I have frequented under usual circumstances, not even in college or pre-kids. But it is fun with friends, and in this day and age there is a better understanding of people who don’t drink – when I ordered my first soda I immediately got the comment, “That’s great, you’re the designated driver!” (Not that that’s why I wasn’t drinking…)
Anyway, I had to swallow some butterflies – somehow standing up and performing in front of your friends can be more anxiety-producing than performing in front of strangers! But I had fun, and got to get up there three times on my own and once with a friend. On my own, I sang “Please Mr. Postman”, “There’s Your Trouble” (Dixie Chicks), and “Something to Talk About” (Bonnie Raitt). The duet was “500 Miles” (by various folk artists); that friend had wanted an opportunity to hear what our voices sounded like in close singing, as opposed to ensemble singing which we have done together several times now in chorus.
When we weren’t singing we had lots of fun conversation about life and, of course, about singing. Everyone is planning their ensembles for the new concert, and we’re getting ready to start again in just over a week. Yay!!
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04.03.07
Posted in Music, Parenting, Singing at 2:05 pm by Christina
I forgot to share something that happened at the concerts! Jeff, the kids and my parents came to the show on Saturday night. As I came out of the wings in the second half for Mockingbird, Jamie piped up quite loudly with “Mama!” The whole crowd sighed, “Awwwwww!” I waved up at him, and the conductor asked, “Was that for real?” as if it were someone else’s kid saying “Mama” to me. (He doesn’t have any kids himself and doesn’t plan to that I know of, he’s over 50 and has girlfriends rather than wives.) Anyway, it was very very sweet 
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Posted in Music, Singing at 11:58 am by Christina
All last week was nightly three-hour practices, with concerts on Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoon. It was a rough week, with things like laundry and home-cooking falling to the wayside as we tried to keep Jeff’s work efforts up during the day so that he was free all evening to be with the kids, do bedtime, etc. I think he’ll agree with me that all of this is worth it – MORE than worth it. I am never so happy with my life as when I am getting to do the music regularly, rehearsing ensembles with friends, and keeping my brain popping with challenging harmonies and rhythms.
The concerts were fantastic, by the chorus’s judgment and by the audience’s. I think the audience really enjoyed this particular concert because it was packed with well-known pieces; even the two classical pieces were recognizable (Wagner’s Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin, aka The Wedding March, and the Anvil Chorus from Il Travatore by Verdi, the refrain of which is like a drinking song and I think felt familiar even if it wasn’t).
My Mockingbird duet with Bill was a terrific hit! When we’d go out front after the show, strangers from the audience would snag us to tell us how great it was; one gentleman even told me, “The Foxxes would be proud!” (They are the writers/composers of the piece.) We did some jitterbugging on Sunday during the 16-bar guitar and piano riffs and that was fun.
Handful of Keys (Fats Waller, “Ain’t Misbehavin’”) went really well after a rocky start at the ensemble tech night last Monday. Our director (who does the keyboard for the ensemble pieces but not the choral pieces) really took off with the rhythm and we totally lost our groove. I had to screw up my courage to speak with him on Tuesday (because he doesn’t take criticism at all – you have to make it “mea culpa, it was my mistake”) and after that we were able to settle in. On Monday, nothing about the piece sounded right except for the notes – we were lost in the many words, our dynamics were nonexistent, and so forth. “Finesse” became our byword after that, to remember to stroke the piece into being and not jump on it.
Other pieces were fabulous as well. We finally found our space on the MGM movie medley – medleys can be really difficult to pull off even when the music is simple and familiar, because you’re transitioning between all sorts of styles in short order and if you carry over a boisterous style into a ballad it’s not going to sound right! Our “torch” singer wowed them every night with Stormy Weather, and the Take Me out to the Ball Game/Oh How I Love a Football Game partner song was another big hit.
Now that I’ve been in the group for several years, another really enjoyable part of the action for me is the camaraderie. After the show on Friday a large group (20?) heads to a restaurant/bar for a late dinner. (I think most of us don’t eat before the show; I personally don’t eat after 4pm for an 8pm show…) I didn’t get home until 12:30! And on Sunday after the show is a potluck cast party with lots of socializing, some karaoke and sometimes the game Encore! It’s a nice opportunity to chill with the gang, and I usually visit more closely with three or four different people before the karaoke starts and learn more about them personally.
Now that the concerts are done, everyone is right back into the music selection for the summer season. Actually, many of us had already taken care of that business during the interlude between auditions and the ensemble results, because the evening ensemble rehearsals are stopped for a while. The concert season is announced in January when the season tickets go on sale, so we knew (or thought we did) that it was going to be a world music concert. I’d concentrated on the Pacific, assembling a group for Waltzing Matilda (with instruments) and finding some Asian pieces for smaller groups too. Unfortunately for us, the director announced this weekend that there was no way he was going to do that program because of the unique challenges of the summer session (fewer people overall, and people in and out with vacations). His opinion is that world music requires at least four languages, which really are our biggest challenge as a group. So the program is going to be limited to music of the Americas, sort of a semi-world approach. A lot of people’s pieces had to get tossed aside for another time…
BUT, it gives me the opportunity I’ve been waiting for to assemble a group to do Sweet Honey in the Rock’s piece On Children. That’s an a cappella piece, so I wanted to wait until I knew some of the other voices better and could build a strong group for the piece. It’s just four voices! And I think I’ll be doing a Caribbean piece for a larger group as well. I’ve been invited to be others’ groups as well (including Motown, Americana and French Canadian) so I’ll be nice and busy with great music during May and June.
I’m worried that I’ll have auditions on the Saturday of Katie’s sleep-away camp concert, but I’ll cross that bridge later!
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