Music on a Monday afternoon

We'd intended to spend today in Africa, and I love that if we change our minds we can easily change our day as well. There is no prewritten script, no lesson plan to follow. We said hi to the elephants and lions we got to know last week, and while shelving books at the library in the afternoon we found a few neat books with African art that we flipped through before they hit the shelf, but the rest of our day was spent at home, glorious home.

Instead of traveling we were creating. Creating clean laundry, creating clean spaces, creating new cities in the play room, creating music, creating in the sewing room, creating art.

We explored our new guitar this afternoon. Along with the piano, which both Calvin and I are still diligently pursuing, the guitar is something I have always wanted to learn. I love folk music and the sound of a good voice accompanied by acoustic guitar. I have (possibly unrealistic) dreams of sitting around our fireplace at night singing to the guitar with friends. A few weeks ago we were lucky enough to collect a pretty nice guitar from another Freecycler. It's been sitting in the corner calling my name ever since and I've been too nervous to pick it up. I'm doing pretty well with the piano, but I need a little more understanding of chords. Jon, on the other hand, has years upon years, a lifetime, of training under his fingers. Tonight we played our first duet, although Jon was concentrating too hard to sing.

It's a fun instrument for Calvin to explore. He's learned a lot about the piano already, and the guitar uses the same method for sound with a similar focus on chords so it's a logical connection for him. I love the music that fills our house each day, even the discordant kind. Music was Calvin's introduction to math. It was his introduction to history when we talked about composers. It is geography when we learn about the origin of pieces, it is anthropology when we learn about its cultural connections.

Music is in everything we learn, or everything we learn is in music. It is joy, is life expressed, and we express a lot of it. It adds much to each day.

Calvin cam

It's not a hootinanny yet, not the kind my dad talks about from his longish hair days back in the sixties, but we all had a good time. And after all, I'm not sure my dad ever really had longish hair.