{Day 24} :: At the Piano

This sitting exercise has revealed to me a number of things. One of them is my tendency to delegate. Now, delegation can be a very handy tool when multiple children exist in a home. It's great to be able to ask Bethie to help Avery with her reading lesson or to hand over Aidan's math questions to Drew. They enjoy helping each other and appreciate the grown-up responsibility.

But sometimes I delegate too much. And often when it comes to Miss Kate. Of course this is perhaps natural since she's the youngest and most needy. If I'm making dinner and she's screaming about trying to find her bike helmet, it makes perfect sense to ask big sister to help out.


Tonight as I tried (for the third time) to finish loading the dinner dishes, Miss Kate decided that she would like to practice the piano. She got three notes into her C scale and shouted, "Mom!!! Can you help me?" My first instinct was to look for Drew. But I stopped myself. The dishes could wait (again). It would be such a small sacrifice to sit beside my daughter on the piano bench.

We sat together, counting out her scale, remembering when to tuck her fingers (with me inwardly cringing and outwardly very rigid because she mostly forgot to tuck her fingers) and finally made it successfully through all eight notes. Three times. And now for the left hand!

When it was time to move on to her song, she was quite confident. She knew she had to stay on the chocolate notes and only once accidentally landed on a vanilla one.

And then we got to duet. It was rather giggly. Mostly because I cannot for the life of me play a song with six hundred flats. We tried again and again and again. I hit a multitude of wrong notes every single time. She giggled some more, hitting her chocolate notes with perfection.

It was an ideal way to not do the dishes. Again.

Read about the thirty-one day challenge over here.