04/18/2012

1.  Mosey has a new hairstyle.  He's trying out a new "slicked back" look.  I think it's cute.  It may not be a sustainable look for him, considering the amount of hair product it requires to keep his firmly-forward growing hair going in a backward direction, but it is cute.  However, for some reason Joseph is not a fan.  All morning long he took every opportunity to muss Mosey's head, causing him to go back into the bathroom to carefully re-do the 'do, until I was able to persuade Joseph that he better not touch or comment about Mosey's hair, or else.  Joseph thought it terribly unfair that I let Mosey get away with this travesty of a hairstyle while I won't let him have long hair.  But, that's the prerogative of being the mom!

2.  Piano lessons this afternoon.  I had a talk with their teacher afterward about poor Brigham.  He practiced so well and so diligently this week, and yet on one of his pieces, he got flustered and wasn't able either to show her what he had accomplished with the piece, or to articulate to her that he *had* actually been practicing hands apart, he *had* been counting out loud, he *had* been working with the metronome.  Those are all things he doesn't particularly like to do-- it's way more fun to jump into a piece hands together and plow through it.  But he has been working hard on breaking things down and practicing the things that aren't so fun.  I don't think his teacher realizes that yet, however, and so when he wasn't playing so great during his lesson, she kind of jumped to the conclusion that he hadn't been doing those things.  She didn't get after him, but still he left the lesson feeling like he had been misunderstood.  So after his lesson I went in there and told her how he had been working on the piece all week, and how he's in a bit of a self-perpetuating rut in which he feels anxiety about his lesson which then causes him not to play his best.  His teacher is really nice (I love her-- honestly she is so wonderful, but she can only make judgments based on what she sees in lessons), and immediately went out to talk to Brigham.  She told him she knows exactly how he feels, and has been in his exact position.  She said, "I've had probably ten thousand lessons in my life, and I've felt the way you feel in about five thousand of them!"  As Brigham and I were walking out to the car to go to violin, he said to me, "If she had a piano lesson every week, it would take more than 200 years to have ten thousand lessons."  The funny thing was I had been doing that exact calculation in my head at the very same time!  So we had a little talk about hyperbole.  :-)

3.  After dinner Ben and I somehow got to talking about what a third world war might look like-- how it would start, how the various sides would precipitate out, and how such a war might be fought and won.  Great, cheerful conversation, to be sure.  The boys got pretty interested, especially Brigham, and soon we were gathered around the world map on the wall turning our kitchen into our very own Turner family war-room.  :-)  Maybe not the best way to send our kids to bed (with visions of nuclear bombs dancing in their heads), but it is pretty cool to have kids that are big enough and smart enough to participate intelligently in conversations like that.