mathmom's blog

I was in the car today, driving Ella to pick up Amanda from school, and I realized that it was awfully quiet. Luke is almost always talking. I looked back and didn't see Luke in the car. "Luke! Luke! are you here!" I yelled. Ella looked up from her book, and said in a worried voice, "No, he's not in the car!" As you can imagine, my thoughts immediately went back to the house where I must have left him---I had a million things to remember today (we went from string lessons to social group to dinner to Taekwondo ), and I have always worried that I would end up forgetting a person. I did once forget Amanda in a waiting room for 3 minutes when I went in to Ella's gym class, although she was 3 months old at the time... "Poor Luke! He must be so worried! He was probably bawling and terrified! He'll never trust me again!" I worried silently. I needed to get off the highway right then, call Michael to pick up Amanda, call the string teac...

This evening Eleanor went down to practice viola. As soon as she started playing, (the Tallis Cannon, if you're interested) another vibration started up. At first, I thought it might be the speakers for the TV or something. However, it hadn't been going on before I went downstairs so that didn't make sense. I made Eleanor stop playing so I could hear the noise better, and the noise went away. She started again, and the noise came back. Hmmm . Maybe a bug? The noise was coming from behind the couch, so Eleanor and I looked but didn't see anything. We figured it was probably under the couch and couldn't be easily found. Eleanor tried to keep playing, but the noise was pretty distracting. I went up to find Michael to see if he would kindly remove the bug from our rec room so Eleanor could practice. When Michael came down again, the bug (almost certainly a cicada) was quiet again, but started right up again when Eleanor started playing. Michael said the bug ...

Some time ago, probably over a year, Eleanor decided that she wanted to learn to play the violin. In my family, we didn't play the violin---piano was ok , band instruments were ok , but it was somehow not done to play a string instrument. I also knew that it was a lot of hard work (not Eleanor's strong point) and it took a lot of parent involvement (not my strong point, especially right then) and so after looking up violin lessons halfheartedly, I gave up. The problem was that Eleanor didn't give up. She kept asking. Every once in a while I would think that she had forgotten, and it would come up again. When our friends from England came to visit, they talked about their string lessons, and Eleanor brought it up again. My friend (who teaches strings) suggested that Eleanor play the viola or cello, since everyone and their dog wants to play violin (really, she said that you have more opportunities to play in groups if you play something other than violin). Thus a futu...