I also taught my sister Sarah a piano lesson on Friday. She's 7 and she lovvves piano. She reminds me a lot of myself at her age actually. I used to practice so much and I would go ahead in my book and try new variations on the songs and I thought I was so good and I just loved it. She is a fast learner and she likes to go ahead in the book, too. I'm also teaching Jacob piano, and Sarah is just a few songs behind him. I am worried that if she catches up to him, he will lose motivation and he won't want to practice as much anymore, so I've been trying to assign Sarah more songs from other books to make it take longer for her to move ahead. But she keeps trying new things on her own and that makes it a little more difficult too.
This week she started working on this one song that Jacob is still working on and even though it sounded good, considering that she had had no instructions from me on it, her timing was off, some of the notes were wrong, and it definitely wasn't ready to be passed off. I told her she did a really good job and that it was cool that she had worked on it on her own and she got really excited and said, "So I can pass it off?!" I said that we would have to keep working on it. As I was writing that in her book, she got really quiet and when I looked over she had tears in her eyes. I was alarmed because I had just told her that she had done a good job! How could she expect to pass off this song that she had been working on on her own after just one week of self-tutelage?
Then I stopped and thought a little more about it. She probably had gone on thinking of how much she would impress her piano teacher at her next lesson. Surely I would be so impressed by her initiative that I would enthusistically allow her to pass it off right away. She probably imagined me gasping in shock at her impressive abilities to learn a song of such difficulty on her own, me calling in other family members to hear her play. When you are seven you have such high hopes for yourself. Kids can envision themselves performing any number of things. They will be astronauts, ballerinas, firefighters, and actresses. Even though I told her she had done a good job this week, my praise was so much less than what she had anticipated, what she had worked for. And so, realizing this, of course I felt a little bad.
But then I thought about it again. Sarah would recover. She really hadn't done well enough to pass the song off. And that was okay, because eventually she would get it. She would walk away from her piano lesson, practice really hard for another week, maybe another two weeks, and then she would pass it off. If she had imagined higher acclamations than a simple sticker and a few words of glowing praise from her teacher, she might be disappointed, but that was okay. Everyone is a little bit disappointed sometimes when others don't think their joke is as funny as they think it is, when a relationship doesn't work out because one person isn't as interested in the other, or when they don't get a job they feel they are perfectly qualified for because whoever is hiring doesn't see your potential the way that you do. Little disappointments happen, but we recover from them, and if we handle them the right way, we will grow from them, too.
Moving on....today at nannying, I showed my letter from Jake to Malan. Jake also sent me a picture he drew of us which I thought was reallyy cute, so i showed that to Malan, too. She got very jealous and said that she wanted Jake to write her a letter too. I told her that if she wrote Jake a letter, he would probably write her one back. She dictated to me the following letter:
Dear Jake,
T. Please send Malan a letter. M. Or a fan. It was so great of her. Jacob. I want you to hold my hand too. Why didn't you say I love you, Malan? Jake. Jake-a. I love you and you want to hold my hand. Can I hold your hand please in one two three days? I did it so you love me. My grandma Tori loves me too. I will send you a mail but you didn't send one back but you don't love me. Look I have. You will hold my hand too. The fan is not for you, it's for my grandma Tori. Because you don't love me, but I said I love you Jake so you will hold my hand. Thank you. Thank you to your mom. Jake-a. Write me a letter too or Heather will cry and her family will be mean to her.
Love,
Malan
which I thought was hilarious. Nannying was so good today because Owen took a four-hour nap, which he practically put himself down for. While Malan and I were coloring, he started to fall asleep on the floor, so I fed him a bottle and put him in his crib. I seriously love nannying. I love Malan and Owen and I know I am going to miss them when I go back to BYU. I like hanging out with people my own age....I like it a lot, but I also really like hanging out with kids. They are just sweet, and even though we learned in my human development class that kids are very egocentric and they aren't really capable of thinking about other people as separate individuals who have feelings too, I know that kids care about other people. They understand raw emotions better than pretty much anyone else in the world. They haven't learned all about propriety and social taboos and so they are as pure as can be. Plus, how can you not miss getting paid to color, eat, and take naps?
Tonight we had family home evening. With 7 kids.....all of whom are really weird.....it gets pretty loud at my house. We all really like each other, and there is so much weirdness and so many inside jokes that it can get really crazy when we are all together. I can't even begin to explain it. People just use weird voices and say stupid things and then everyone else cracks up. I often think that living with my family is like living in a musical, or in a reality tv show. (I swear that would make money if it existed.) At this particular family night, we were talking about the family reunion that is coming up on July 9th. We will all be flying out to Utah at about 7 a.m. We have never taken a flight as a whole family so it should be interesting. As we were going over the calendar for the upcoming two weeks, the noise level kept rising and rising. I am pretty sure my dad's blood pressure is directly related to the noise level in our house, so as we got louder and louder, he got more and more stressed. By the time we were halfway through Wednesday and our neighbors could have listened in if they wanted to, my dad decided that was enough and started yelling about how we really needed to be quiet because it was way too loud and he was going to start sending people to bed and they weren't going to be happy if this kept on, etc. My mom decided to start a quiet game in which participation was mandatory and for the rest of the night she kept a running tally for everyone who was talking out of turn with the promise of a fantastic reward to be given to the winner. Things quieted down considerably, but my dad was still very stressed and I guess he felt like someone had to be punished so he stopped listening to the calendar entirely and glared around the room instead, pouncing on anyone who opened their mouth too widely. It turned into a big pick-on-everyone-else-fest and by Friday, July 10th, feelings were hurt and three people had left the room in annoyance. With the calendar over, Dad yelled that it was his turn and that everyone had better get back in the kitchen for his lesson on.....etiquette?
....Ironic? Maybe?
Regardless, everyone came back and soon the musical started up again, our collective good humor restored by togetherness. It is one of my favorite things in this life that I am friends with the people in my family. I love love love all of my siblings and my parents. They might drive me crazy sometimes but I honestly wouldn't trade them for anything.
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