Harp institute

Lydia and I are in Logan, Utah for the week. She is attending the Suzuki Harp Institute, and my mom and Abe are kindly holding down the fort while we do 9-5 harp immersion up here.

An advertisement for family counseling is included in the welcome packet to the institute, and today’s schedule included group counseling on how to be a Suzuki parent. It has been really wonderful to talk with other mothers about the challenges of practice. We have two hours of individual practice scheduled into our days, and since the practice rooms are all under construction, we have to haul the harp to the nearest semi-private corner to practice. I don’t care to haul the harp far, so our practice was relatively public today. Considering Lydia cries every time we practice, we publicly demonstrated the challenges of practice for the entire institute today.

We also have two master classes, Kindermusic, a recital, and arts and crafts scheduled into the day. By the end Lydia and I were seeing stars. I did not even have the energy to sight -see, which is a crying shame because Logan is GORGEOUS. From my hotel window I can see green farms, green mountains, and layers upon layers of clouds and sky. I have hopes that tomorrow we can actually explore the beautiful valley a little bit.

I took a break from blogging for a while because Abe and I were manically social for several weeks. Every night I was too tied up being tired to blog.  We had dinner with the Marchants, the Harmons, the Crofts, the Andersons (new in our ward), work parties for Abe, in-law picnics, an overnight stay in Wolf Creek with the other in-laws for the 4th of July, birthday parties and navigated a very difficult babysitting situation with our neighbors. This ended in extracting ourselves from a situation that endangered our children. Right now we have friends staying with us for the week (well, with my mom, Abe, Ammon and Mary), and when Lydia and I get back my plan is to go on a long, long holiday from people. We are so blessed to have kind, wonderful friends, but I just don’t have the social stamina for non-stop interaction. We will have to be hermits for a good long while after this.