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Jun. 11th, 2012 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
same_skyShoulder still hurts but not worse than yesterday. Knee is sore but not terrible. I feel like I was lightly beaten on my right side, but all in all--today is going better than I expected after yesterday's fall.
I thought that it would be a good time, while I am kind of out of commission, to reinstall Windows today and so I did that, after trying hard to talk myself out of it. It was boring but went well, except now I am using Office 2010 (ie, Outlook) instead of 2007 and it is so ugly that my eyes are bleeding. Why, Microsoft, why? I think the tiny nerdling was feeling a bit tired, too. She mainly wanted to hang around and watch TV today, which is not her usual thing. I had absolutely no problem with it today, since enriching activities usually encourage the usage of arms and I have been trying to avoid that.
So, on to the next installment of "my kid is overscheduled". Ballet recital was awesome. It really was. The other stuff that she has done has been... repetitive. There's no conclusion. With the recital, you get something at the end and she loved it more than ice cream. It was fun to watch the rest of the kids dance, too, actually, though I didn't get to stay for the second act. Evie wanted to and I sort of did, but M was definitely in favor of leaving, as were our two Swedish friends who were over to visit. They wanted to come watch--well, they said that they did. Mainly I think they were just being polite, but they paid ten bucks each to come, which I thought was really sweet. The music was way too loud and the Swedish ear is apparently very sensitive because all three of them were freaking out. So I bribed E into leaving at intermission for pity's sake. I told her we would go get her flowers right then instead of the next day if we left, but otherwise we wouldn't have time. Yes, we are the crappy parents who forgot to have flowers at recital. I warned her on the way there by way of making it out to be something I had done on purpose. "Mommy is going to take you to pick out your own flower that you can plant in the yard and keep for even longer!" Yeah. That worked well. She thought it was a great idea except what she really wanted was cut flowers. I don't like having cut flowers in the house because they generally make my allergies unhappy after awhile. These aren't kill me so far, though.
[recital picture really should go here but I don't have the energy.]
Anyway, remember how I've been saying that we won't do ballet again? I said it'd take a miracle for her to talk me into it again. I guess that miracle was recital, because she is doing ballet again next year after all. She's high on recital love. However, I made her choose between ballet and gymnastics, so we're off the gymnastics thing now at least. I just do not have it in me to do all of this stuff any more, especially not with violin. More on that in a minute. I think it probably makes sense that she stop gymnastics. She's been doing it for a long time now, and I think she's getting less out of it (although I did put her in the Basic level for older kids and it has worked out much better for her... especially since she was the only one signed up for the class and therefore, it was a private lesson...) Ballet doesn't start again until the fall (last year it was the end of August) so I got two months of freedom there with the gymnastics being canceled. I'm not even sure what to do with myself.
We may not be doing violin much longer either...we'll see how it goes. I don't know if she's just not old/mature enough or if she doesn't really like it or what, but it's not going well so far. She's not doing the insane shyness thing now, but she's resistant to practicing. This weekend, we came up with a sticker chart plan that is helping immensely. She gets a sticker to put on a calendar if she practices for five minutes a day. Five minutes! We are not asking much! So far, she's gotten a sticker every day although I'm not sure she deserved it today even though she went for eight minutes. (Timer malfunction.) Can you call it violin practice if you lay back on the couch, resting your violin on your stomach while screeching the bow back and forth with no discernible purpose? She's supposed to be practicing three little rhythms. She thinks that she shouldn't have to practice except in class. Umm... no. I can see where she would think that--she doesn't have to practice ballet/gymnastics when she's not in class. It's just not the same with this. I don't want to force her to give it up before she has learned that she has to stick with things even when they're hard, but at the same time, if it's going to be a fight, I'd prefer to opt out. The teacher said that it will come together much faster once she starts learning melodies. I hope so. I know that this is going to be her particular learning struggle as she gets older, too--she is just one of those kids that thinks that she should be able to do something perfectly the first time, and if she can't, she doesn't want to keep trying. In theory, she knows she needs to practice. In practice, she hates it.
Can't imagine where she'd have gotten that from.
I thought that it would be a good time, while I am kind of out of commission, to reinstall Windows today and so I did that, after trying hard to talk myself out of it. It was boring but went well, except now I am using Office 2010 (ie, Outlook) instead of 2007 and it is so ugly that my eyes are bleeding. Why, Microsoft, why? I think the tiny nerdling was feeling a bit tired, too. She mainly wanted to hang around and watch TV today, which is not her usual thing. I had absolutely no problem with it today, since enriching activities usually encourage the usage of arms and I have been trying to avoid that.
So, on to the next installment of "my kid is overscheduled". Ballet recital was awesome. It really was. The other stuff that she has done has been... repetitive. There's no conclusion. With the recital, you get something at the end and she loved it more than ice cream. It was fun to watch the rest of the kids dance, too, actually, though I didn't get to stay for the second act. Evie wanted to and I sort of did, but M was definitely in favor of leaving, as were our two Swedish friends who were over to visit. They wanted to come watch--well, they said that they did. Mainly I think they were just being polite, but they paid ten bucks each to come, which I thought was really sweet. The music was way too loud and the Swedish ear is apparently very sensitive because all three of them were freaking out. So I bribed E into leaving at intermission for pity's sake. I told her we would go get her flowers right then instead of the next day if we left, but otherwise we wouldn't have time. Yes, we are the crappy parents who forgot to have flowers at recital. I warned her on the way there by way of making it out to be something I had done on purpose. "Mommy is going to take you to pick out your own flower that you can plant in the yard and keep for even longer!" Yeah. That worked well. She thought it was a great idea except what she really wanted was cut flowers. I don't like having cut flowers in the house because they generally make my allergies unhappy after awhile. These aren't kill me so far, though.
[recital picture really should go here but I don't have the energy.]
Anyway, remember how I've been saying that we won't do ballet again? I said it'd take a miracle for her to talk me into it again. I guess that miracle was recital, because she is doing ballet again next year after all. She's high on recital love. However, I made her choose between ballet and gymnastics, so we're off the gymnastics thing now at least. I just do not have it in me to do all of this stuff any more, especially not with violin. More on that in a minute. I think it probably makes sense that she stop gymnastics. She's been doing it for a long time now, and I think she's getting less out of it (although I did put her in the Basic level for older kids and it has worked out much better for her... especially since she was the only one signed up for the class and therefore, it was a private lesson...) Ballet doesn't start again until the fall (last year it was the end of August) so I got two months of freedom there with the gymnastics being canceled. I'm not even sure what to do with myself.
We may not be doing violin much longer either...we'll see how it goes. I don't know if she's just not old/mature enough or if she doesn't really like it or what, but it's not going well so far. She's not doing the insane shyness thing now, but she's resistant to practicing. This weekend, we came up with a sticker chart plan that is helping immensely. She gets a sticker to put on a calendar if she practices for five minutes a day. Five minutes! We are not asking much! So far, she's gotten a sticker every day although I'm not sure she deserved it today even though she went for eight minutes. (Timer malfunction.) Can you call it violin practice if you lay back on the couch, resting your violin on your stomach while screeching the bow back and forth with no discernible purpose? She's supposed to be practicing three little rhythms. She thinks that she shouldn't have to practice except in class. Umm... no. I can see where she would think that--she doesn't have to practice ballet/gymnastics when she's not in class. It's just not the same with this. I don't want to force her to give it up before she has learned that she has to stick with things even when they're hard, but at the same time, if it's going to be a fight, I'd prefer to opt out. The teacher said that it will come together much faster once she starts learning melodies. I hope so. I know that this is going to be her particular learning struggle as she gets older, too--she is just one of those kids that thinks that she should be able to do something perfectly the first time, and if she can't, she doesn't want to keep trying. In theory, she knows she needs to practice. In practice, she hates it.
Can't imagine where she'd have gotten that from.
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Date: 2012-06-13 06:17 pm (UTC)I always hated practicing so I tried not to push it too much with her but G, who was always such a dutiful little boy, was driven mad by Ingrid's nonchalant attitude about it. My beef was that she couldn't hear when she was flat or sharp and needed to move her finger just ever so slightly. She would be adamant that her finger was on the tape so she was right and I would be just as adamant that she was wrong.
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Date: 2012-06-21 01:21 am (UTC)Anyway... practice at this point is mainly about her standing up straight, on both feet, and holding the violin correctly, both arms. She will walk around with the most horrible posture and hold the thing with just her chin in the center of her body and use the bow way too fast across the strings in the wrong place so that it makes that awful screechy noise, and therefore thinks that it should count as practice. I mean, she's five. I get it! But SERIOUSLY. M started doing the timing for her yesterday and today, and today she spent something like 23 minutes whining/being goofy before she practiced for a full 5. I KNOW it's really boring for her right now because it's about posture and not really songs or technique, but I don't know what she's getting out of this grumping. Her teacher keeps trying to explain to her that if she gets it to be natural now, it will be much easier for her later, but she doesn't seem to care and I haven't the faintest idea how to make her want to. This is all something that SHE is interested in, not me! I think music is perfectly worthwhile and all, but I don't think that it's necessary at age five. That's all her and so I surely hate having to deal with this negativity about it. I also don't want to overly nag her on it so I have told her that if she doesn't want to earn her sticker for the day, that's fine, but along with the loss of her rewards, at a certain point without practice, we will stop going to lessons as well because it doesn't make sense to do lessons without practice or you never improve, so she always decides to practice but then when she gets the thing out she goes nuts. UGH.
How old was Ingrid during this? She's not playing now, is she? Does she play something else now?