Life is snickering at me

For those of you who do not know (my children), I have a four year degree in music during which I studied piano.  I have about 26 years of experience in classical piano including one year of a masters in music theory.  I have about 15 years of teaching experience and have special training in early childhood music.  I spent my collegiate summers doing music internships and intensive immersion programs.  

And, my kids picked...the VIOLIN!!  Laine begged for two years to play the violin.  We said maybe, drug our feet, offered piano (you know, MY instrument) and finally gave in.  Now, we have a line in front of the dusty piano for a turn on the Suzuki violin foot chart.  

Yes, I am a classically trained piano teacher, and my children are fighting over their turns to play the violin.

My brother played the violin.

I play the piano.

I have already been through beginning violin and still remember vividly that tiny violins sound...like tiny violins.  I remember listening to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in an interminable loop.  I remember, smugly thinking, it's a good thing that I teach PIANO...no tiny violins in my future.

Annabel had her first violin lesson this week.  She was thrilled!  She needs a 1/32 size violin (if anyone has one...), which, for those of you keeping score, is the tiniest of the tiny violins.  Basically it is a key chain with strings.  

So, I bummed my brother's old violin off my mom...and decided to join 'em!

And you know what...I was mistaken!  Tiny violins sound like happiness rolled in fairy dust.

Our Little School

Our school pace sorta matches my pace these days...slow.  Our days are full of absurdly huge worms, counting, music...lots and lots of music, and all kinds of ways for Mama to run the fire out of these cherubs.   I think they are having fun, but I am seriously dominating kindergarten!!  

In My Weakness

Confession: I fell flat on my face this week.  It wasn't pretty and I wasn't super.  I was tired and frantic and overwhelmed.  I got the hard news that I am at the end of myself.

But, it is actually wonderful news.  My strength has failed.  Utterly.  And here in this place I must ask for help.  Simply and humbly.  I can not paint a picture of how beautiful and charming my life is because I get up finished and stagger from one rest period to the next.  I find I haven't written because writing blossoming words about bread-making and nurturing children and vegetables echo in the emptiness of my self.  It seems that out here in the world there is no place for feebleness and limping, but I am feeble and I waddle when I don't limp.  I have struggled forward because what hounds me is the desire to be sufficient and the guilt of need.  Help is a beautiful, terrible word because it implies need and vulnerability, and it took just a bit more than everything I had to learn to whisper it.

Often people ask how I do this life, and truly, today, I do it soaked in prayer, but not in my own feeble prayers but in those who have come along side me and shown me what community means.  This week, I have known what it is to be carried, and it hurt--it hurt to know that I can't.  The stubbornness that marbles my bones threatened to make me miss this opportunity.  It is uncomfortable to be needy.  It is wretched to be unable.  It is beautiful to finally, gratefully come to the end of myself and reach out and find the hands that are always there and will always be.  

I am not pressing on, I am pressing in.  Grace and mercy have found me and I have met them with joy and pain.  I am a very slow learner and sickeningly stubborn, so it is with great relief that I travel here to the end of myself and learn to be quiet.

Just a bit more full than I ever imagined

I can't juggle.

In fact, I can barely catch.

So, balancing this wild crew is a full-brain activity for me.  

Part of me wants to apologize for writing so infrequently, but, the truth is, in my absence from this place I have been present in another.

A few updates:

1. Plants in bags don't do that well.  Probably fertilizer would have helped.  
2. Our new little arrival is being impatiently awaited by her brothers and sister (and parents).  Names in the running: Tigger, Squirt and Annabel Laine...
3. Laine has lost two teeth and learned to ride a two wheeled bike this summer.

I am almost sure this doesn't make me old, but it might.