little drummer boy

You may recall that a couple of months ago Nate made his own drum set in our family room. We decided to set him up with drum lessons and found a great drummer in the area (aka Jeff). It's funny, because I have mixed emotions about the whole thing. I LOVE that Nate's interested in music, and I think the drums are super cool. But the neurotic mother part of me is worried about him loosing his hearing. Why not a quiet instrument? Something like a mandolin? I guess the best solution would be to buy him earplugs if/when he gets a set. And Nate's excited to set up a PreK class band with his friend Nolan on guitar and Aurora on lead vocals. I will definitely need my video camera if we ever get to that stage.

We had our first lesson last Tuesday. I thought Nate was going to get a literal and proverbial bang out of it, but he was really shy and reserved. Whose kid is this?! Jeff was really great with Nate - very patient and encouraging - but I left thinking that we were probably jumping the gun with the lessons. I realized after talking with Nate that he had expected a group, rather than something one-on-one, and I could understand how that change would be overwhelming.

So, back we went yesterday with my very low expectations and... Nate was awesome! He has pretty good rhythm and made up some patterns totally on his own, like a "bass, high hat, bass, high hat" repeating pattern, and a set of three notes followed by a rest (boom, boom, boom, rest, boom, boom, boom, rest...) I think his biggest early hurdle will be learning his right and left hands. This was a big challenge because he and Jeff would sit facing each other and Jeff would hit the drum with his right arm and say "right!" and Nate would mirror him and bang the drum with his left. There was also a funny moment when Jeff asked him to count and then paused to ask if Nate knew how to count yet. Ah, the unexpected traps of working with a preschooler!

'tis the season

one!

Anja is one! Time flies.

Anja is really into babies. I roll my eyes at how gender stereotyped my kids' interests are - Nate loves trucks, Anja loves babies - but there it is. So be it. I have no problem encouraging and celebrating their interests, even if they are nauseatingly stereotypical. So for her birthday we gave Anja a baby doll. She was so excited about it, but seems to have inherited my patience (or lack thereof) and was not pleased that it took a whole minute or two to extricate the poor thing from her box. At least it seems she has not yet passed this trait along to her own baby.