Keep Moving Forward

D had only been taking piano lessons for  about 2 months when the faucet of life was shut down to a trickle.  He had been loving it,  I mean loving it! It made me wonder why we hadn’t ventured down this path before.  However, a long time ago, I made a commitment to myself and my family that we would limit extra curricular activities in an effort to save our sanity.  One activity per child could potentially translate to being on the run 5 nights a week.  Even that sounds like too much.

But since D is homeschooled, we were able to find an amazing (fully booked) piano teacher who could sneak in lessons during the school day.  So in late January, piano became a part of D’s curriculum without sacrificing the family dinner table.  You see, we made a deal early in the 2019-2020 school year.  Our two-time regional spelling bee champ and Scripps National Spelling Bee contestant was deliberating whether or not to continue on the spelling journey and give it his all for his final year.  It was a decision between letting spelling become his main focus for this last shot at spelling his way into the finals of the National Bee, or simply moving on.  I suggested to help make that decision clearer, he create a list of other things he’d want to pursue if he were not dedicating hours a day to practicing spelling, learning language patterns, rule exceptions and words recently added to the 460,000 entry dictionary. In the end, he hung up his spelling hat and started venturing on to new challenges.

On that short list of other interests was learning to play the piano (the right way).  He’d been messing around on a keyboard, teaching himself to play songs he loves and doing a little composing too. He tried a bit with online piano lessons and piano books, but he needed a real teacher.  Luckily, we found the perfect match.  Two weeks in to his piano lesson journey, I was already wondering why we had waited so long.  It was not particularly surprising that he took to piano quickly and passionately.  Music has been very important to D for quite some time.  He is a percussionist in the band (preferring to play bells over drums), and he is almost always listening to, humming, or playing some tune.

Unfortunately, after about 2 months of lessons, our society shut down.  Luckily, his piano teacher has been continuing lessons via video conferences on zoom.  In the picture above, you can see the IPad precariously positioned on a stack of books to give the piano teacher an “over the shoulder” view of D at the keyboard.  It’s not perfect. There are definitely frustrations in learning piano (or anything!) over video conference.  But it’s better than nothing.  We keep moving forward.