Where it All Goes Down

Tuesday is quickly becoming one of my favourite days of the week. A small flock of violinists gather in my living room to play some A's some E's and a few F sharps. Emily, who after four years of "suzuki learn by ear" method is ready to dive into note reading, comes to learn the skill of reading music with some friends. Gabrielle a 14 year old young man/beginner violin student, from our ward, who won a seminary auction item that I donated last year of 'how to read music". Finally, Diana my friend and buddy who for many years has said to me I've always wanted to learn the violin, and I've always wanted to swap lessons for some prime "take the kids" babysitting time. The hour starts with some tonalization, speed note drills, and moves into hard core note reading at it's finest. And then, at the end of the lesson, the gears shift. I pick up my cello and play the bass line of the most famous wedding piece on the planet and the violins join in playing the first eight notes of the Pachelbels Canon. We only played eight notes but there wasn't a dry eye in the room. Perhaps a small exaggeration, perhaps not. We are only on week three...but it is confirmed, I love Tuesdays.

A Little Lesson:
I remember thinking to myself, I am too busy to teach my own child violin these days let alone others from my ward! There is no way for this to work. Traditionally a student would come, learn for half an hour and go. I don't have time for that kind of committment. With a little finessing, we created something much better, more fun and a lot more rewarding. Many of life's solutions come in the form of finessing the traditional. I think finessing or tweaking our lives is one the most productive excercises of staying on track of our goals. When things don't seem to be working, don't give up, or throw in the towel, just tweak. In order for me to be a stay at home mom, living in Vancouver we just keep tweaking the budget, we keep tweaking our schedule so that we can go to the temple and be part of a soccer league on Saturdays, we keep tweaking our morning routines to find that perfect time to gather as a family to study the scriptures. When things change, and they always do, we continue to tweak. Tweaking allows us to have things go totally wrong and still know and believe that with a few tweaks there is a solution down the road to what we are trying to accomplish. I don't even know if that's how you spell tweak, but it's one of my favourite words.