Children
I have two of them. Popsicle is four years old now. It's so crazy. She is such a little adult. She has very good language skills so she really does sound like an adult. She talks like me (which is hilarious and cute; she says things like 'indeed', to affirm a conversation, and 'that certainly sounds good!').

Also, I have never seen another child who deals with being sick like Popsicle. She is the trooper of all troopers. There is no whining or complaining, even when she is vomiting every thirty minutes for five hours (it was a nasty bug, we all got it, it sucked my ass). She was downstairs with my parents for her sickness (as I was upstairs throwing up), and when she came home the next day and I asked her about being sick she shrugged and said "I got through it". She is four. I know many adults who aren't that good about being sick.

Baby Yammers is doing...well. He is a going concern. People often use that particular phrase when speaking to me regarding him when we are out together. He is always on the go. He never stops moving. Never. If he is not in my arms (which he happens to like doing quit a bit, yes my back is fucking killing me he weighs frickin' 28 lbs) he is running around trying to find new things to pick up and move from one place to another and/or stick in his mouth and/or smash/bang.

He absolutely LOVES computers. He is obsessed with smashing his always sticky little paws onto the keyboard and somehow managing to do the most bizarre things. He somehow changed my system preferences... it's like magic! He also loves remote controls and telephones. He often pretends the remote control is a telephone and holds it to his ear and walks around the room talking into it. It's damned cute.

He is also the king of tantrums. He's a VERY persistent little bugger and gets VERY angry when he doesn't get his way. He has just turned one and we are currently in a stage of throwing himself onto the floor and just wailing. It's so very charming. I look forward to him getting over it when he finally realises it's not the way he's going to get what he wants. But, as I said, he is a persistent little bugger. I am (as always) watchful for signs of autism, as I was with Popsicle.

Choirs
So, my music classes are going well. I have had some ups and downs, as is to be expected in all things to do with living but I think that it has turned out well. I have had good feedback from the ladies as it is sign up time for next term and they are signing up again to come back. Yeah for me! I am proud of my ladies as they have really come a long way from their first class and they try really hard. I am going to record them this Monday I think, as it is the penultimate class. I hope they bring their pretty voices. If the recording is even mediocre I will post it I think. It should be cute.

My youth choir has been a bit more disappointing. There were a lot of kids not showing up all the time. I have had a class of three kids for the last two weeks, and previous to that it was five I think. The class list shows seven kids. Anyway, that has been frustrating for me, and made it difficult to do things with them as as choir and as music theory students.

We got through a little theory, I did teach them about notes and the beginnings of how to read music. I think they get measures and know how to understand time signature. Of course, it's hard to know because every class there are kids missing stuff and then when they show up I have to catch them up. Their understanding of musicality has definitely improved. They understand more about rhythm and keeping time and how this is a relationship the music has with the notes on the page.

I did end up playing them classical music, we listened to bits of Wagner's Funeral March and Mozart's Eine Kleine Nacht Musik and did some comparisons about the feel of them and the instruments used and the mood of the music and rhythm to make that mood etc. They seemed to like that, and when some of  them didn't like the music too much, that was okay, but most of them did like it.

I also played them Louis Armstrong because I love him, and some of them found his voice nice and some didn't, and that was okay too. They all like the seven piece jazz though which made me happy. I absolutely stopped them in their tracks when I played an A cappella Ladysmith Black Mambazo, they were all running around playing and I put it on to end the game and they just froze. It was an excellent moment. They all stared at me and then one of them said in awe "what is that?". They had difficulty discerning whether there were instruments playing with the singers. The kids were astounded to learn it was just voices - they all thought it was beautiful. I asked them what they thought was neat about it and  one girl said "it sounds like one voice sort of" and another said "they sound like instruments". I know just what they mean.

We also listened to some Beastie Boys and they had a good, yet difficult time dissecting the instrumentation. A number of them were surprised by how many things there were going on in the music at the same time. The orchestration of it all, they were impressed with that. They caught on quickly to the back beat and enjoyed the rhythm, which I definitely understand!

I am concerned about what the youth choirs' last class will be like, as it is supposed to be a "recital". I'm clearly not going to be having any great recital with a group I haven't even seen together since the third class. In fact, many of them won't even know the last song we learned because it has been in the last three classes. Sooooooo.... that 'recital' may totally go badly. I hope I don't look too stupid. But, I will be saying something before they perform together about people missing classes and therefore them not getting what they could etc. It's the stupid parents. One girl told me she missed the last class cause her mom wanted to watch American Idol. Can we all see the irony here? Clearly the mom missed it. Bah!

Revisiting old Entries

So, I was perusing old diary entries as I sometimes do when I am putting pieces of someone on Husi together. Anyway, I was looking over CBB's diary entry about my rack. It was funny, all that intrigue about my boobs. Very silly, but quite entertaining.

I didn't say a lot at the time, I posted few comments on the diary, but one of them was heartfelt. That was a call out to codemonkey uk to apologise for calling me (a number of times in posting) a man in a woman's body. Now, I know it is CBB he doesn't like and he was lashing out at me to hurt him, but still, really it wasn't nice. I mean, you could give a girl a complex saying things like that. Not only that but he was fighting to say that not all women are like me (which is VERY true) as his wife is different, yet that made him label me in this offensive way, making me the bizarre one and his wife the normal one. That's not nice. Couldn't it just be that his wife is just fine being who she is, and I am just fine being who I am? Both of us are normal women because both of us are women who exist...right? So, I still await that apology, I think it is due, I am a big believer in forgiveness but one should take responsibility for their mistakes.

Okay. I was going to write more but I have stuff to do that I can't not do anymore.