elise happy to show off her violin with a crazy kid in front of her. ha ha ha.SO, elise has chosen to play the violin this year. when i say play the violin i mean bring it to school two days a week and then bring it home and put it in the corner. getting her to practice has resulted in many a melt downs. something that has made me regret the whole playing an instrument. anyhow, she had her winter concert a couple weeks ago and she was quite excited to show off her violin skills (which really is only her plucking her violin strings). we showed up thinking in our ignorant parent mind that we were coming to watch a concert only for her strings group. uh, no. it was a concert for the 3-4 grade strings, 4-6 grade strings, and the 4-6 grade band. yikes! that's a whole lota concert. it made sense to do it all on one night, but i wasn't quite ready to sit and listen to grade school music for the evening. now, in my hay day i also played in the band. i started out playing in the percussion group, then i moved on to playing the clarinet. looking back in my young mind i remember thinking "wow, this is sounding really good." or "we are rad, this sounds great." now i realize just the horror that i had to subject my parents to. did my band REALLY sound this bad when i played? well, unfortunately it probably did. most parents kept a pretty good face and watched their kids with pride, having the video cameras poised and a smile plastered to their expressions. the mister and i on the other hand just laughed with our video camera in hand, mixed with a few cringes. my ears were bleeding by the close of the so-called "concert". in the end though, where else are they going to start? and having them show off what they learned is the only way for them to feel proud of themselves and move on to be better and better (hopefully). i mean i felt awesome after all my concerts, so proud of my accomplishments. i hope elise felt the same. i AM proud of elise. i'm proud of her for wanting to take on a new skill and well she's made it this far without practice so hooray for her. let's see how the end of year concert goes....
