Here comes TaeKwonDo/Cello Mom. … Isaac just earned his blue tip belt (one below green) in TaeKwonDo last week, on the very same day he got his beautiful new cello! Young Yoyo Ma had his first lesson later that day. I worried that he would be exhausted and unable to focus, but no. He did wonderfully. He listened, he sat still, he asked questions. (He was especially intrigued to find out how they make cellos in the first place, to the extent that I've arranged to take him to a cello making place to see it in person!) And turns out his cello teacher also loves Godzilla movies (so much so that she said at one point she had planned a PhD dissertation topic– the history of Godzilla movies as compared with the Japanese economy) and so they got off to a great start.
All week we've been home a lot due to snow storms and sore throats in constant alternation. While house bound, we've had time for many a cello concert. One thing that's nice about the cello is that even a complete beginner can saw away at it, and it still sounds pretty nice. It's not shrill like a violin… speaking of violins.. Elias now wants one. We walked into a little children's string concert the other week and Elias marched right up to a violin and said, "Mommy, I play violin!" clear as you please. I know that he said it in the present tense just because "I would like to play" is beyond his level of English, but it sounded like a "Little Buddha" type statement. ("These are my glasses," says the little American boy, picking up the glasses of the late Dalai Lama.) It startled the teacher, who said, "How old is he?" I told her he's two, and she said, "Hm. How 'bout viola?" This is the same lady who when I got in touch with her looking for piano lessons for Isaac she said, "Oh, lots of kids play piano. How 'bout the cello?"
In any case, later this afternoon I have to take the cello in for a minor repair (tonight is our second lesson), and I have to bring Elias, and I know for a fact that at the cello place they have the TINIEST violins in the whole world! They are like doll violins and almost unbearably adorable. I'll show one to Elias and see what he says.
Elias's quest to kill himself has not abated. Just last night I was in the kitchen with him and in some fraction of a second (I was standing right there), he opened a drawer, pulled out a blender wand thing (sort of a blade on a stick, when you look at it right), PLUGGED IT IN, and was fumbling with the on-button such that he could chop off all his fingers. Now, I was three feet away, and dove for it. But still. And was Monday when he was working on a project in the bathroom, ten feet from where I was in the kitchen. THe project was washing sea shells, and it was a project I fully condoned. Then there was the sounds of breaking glass. I rushed in and found that he had dropped a large rock into the round glass vase that had been holding the sea shells. He was kneeling on the counter amid bits of broken glass, while trying to fit his little hand into the jagged opening in the broken vase.
I ask you!
This reminds me of how at thanksgiving in Minneapolis we were visiting my aunt and uncle and fully six adults, on the task, could not keep Elias out of trouble. Everyone was milling around in the kitchen, when I saw that Elias was taking all sorts of precious objects off a low glass shelf. I ran over and began taking them from him, but he was grabbing them as fast as I could get them from him and my hands were almost instantly getting full. "Help!" I cried, and several people came to my aid. All the delicate things were put up on a high glass shelf in the other room. But there was still some tidying up to do where Elias had been making the mess in the first place. So while several of us were putting things right in the kitchen there was a thirty-second period during which unattended Elias began to climb the tall glass shelf! HE wanted the things that had been taken from him. He was up a few rungs, clinging to the stereo with his fingernails, when my aunt discovered him. So we went to deal with that. Then to my astonishment, my uncle began dumping out a large bottle of coins on to the floor, for Elias to play with. Within about three seconds, Elias had spread the coins all over the kitchen floor in a single layer that was very slow and difficult to pick back up. Teams of us were working with a dustpan and a funnel… I asked my uncle what he was thinking… and he explained that he thought Elias would sit there putting them back in the bottle, which is what the granddaughters always do. They simply don't throw them all over the place! They don't walk in the pile and spread it all around. I said, "I thought you had this place pre-toddlered, due to all the grandchildren…" and they said, "We don't have THAT KIND of grandchildren!" (In print it looks like that could be a mean statement, but they said it very warmly and we all laughed.)
That is, the girls! The girls apparently don't run everyone ragged in this particular constant, determined, dangerous, stressful manner. I think Elias did about ten more such things before the night was out, and everyone was exhausted. (Isaac for his part mostly stayed out of trouble, except for having a horrible tantrum! And throwing a box of oil pastels up in the air such that it actually hit the ceiling!)
Now.. … why am I tired all the time? And why can't i ever, ever get the laundry caught up? Oh, yeah. I remember.
More words of Elias:
Dy-lo-lo: dinosaur
Mini-mina: banana
Hall of fame statement, as Elias bids adieu to the contents of a flushing toilet: "Bye-bye poop! See you soon! Have fun!"