Things I Learned in April and the First Week of May

I’m a little late to document what I’ve been learning this month because the past few days have been a bit crazy.

• Mr. Trouble on Feet and I really enjoyed learning about the Tower of London and the Taj Mahal. Both buildings have such interesting histories. We decided we would really like to take a field trip to the Tower of London.
• At the piano. I have been learning numerous accompaniments for my string players. As always, they keep me on my toes. I’m always struggling to keep up with them! I’ve also been plugging away at my long-term project of learning a Beethoven sonata. I’m a third of the way through the last movement, and the other movements are going fairly well.
• I’ve been experimenting with a new way to do a black and white conversion of a photograph. It’s been fun to try a new method and have some new tricks in my toolbox.
• Throughout the school year Mr. TOF and I have been studying a different composer each week as well as a different artist. We have both really enjoyed it a lot. One of our favorite artists that we recently learned about was Pieter Bruegel. His artwork kind of feels like Where’s Waldo? of the Middle Ages.
• While we studied Dorothea Lange I spent some time reading about her work in documenting the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It was very interesting to read about her process and perspective.
• When my middle kidlets went back to school four days a week this last month, I realized how hearing positive feedback and praise from other people outside of the family is incredibly impactful and motivating . It’s something that I may not have understood the true value of had we not spent more than a year pretty much isolated, and it’s been pretty amazing to watch how simple words have really spun one kidlet in particular into a happy state of mind, ready to tackle hard things.
• Mr. TOF and I did a bit of reading about Mexico and Haiti, and I now have a much better broad understanding of the histories of both of these countries.
• This last Tuesday I attended a Car Sing with my choir. We all parked our cars in a church parking lot, and some amazing coordinators and sound magicians presented us each with a microphone. Our conductor stood on scaffolding, and somehow all of our singing was mixed together on a computer and broadcast back into our car radios so we could hear each other sing live, in person with no delay. It actually worked amazingly great (and we were blessed to have cooperative weather!) While it wasn’t the same as singing together on risers, we were all just so happy to be all in one place singing together! It was so much work to put it all together, but I learned that we were all just hungry to make music together with other people. You could just feel excitement oozing out the car windows, and people kept asking the conductor, “Can we just sing it again?” I think all musicians are just starving for the opportunity to make music together again right now.