Winging it

Today I held a training meeting for an art project at the elementary school. I was supposed to give the intro to the project then start a video explaining it. Technical difficulties with the video resulted in me explaining the project. I thought the whole thing went smoothly. Afterward, a woman at the training said to me, is there a way to check out the video?  Um, yeah, so I guess the whole thing didn’t go all that smoothly. 

I recently read an article mentioning how mom’s have a lot going on all of the time. When they are buying groceries their mind is going a mile a minute deciding what each night’s dinner will be like and how the family will work around sports and parent teacher conference. They’ve got to have knowledge of how much toilet paper is available so they can restock without any delay in service. This is the same with soap, cheese (at least at my house), garbage bags, paper, sandwich bags. Their is concern about what birthday party gift they need to pick up, who is playing with who, and how their oldest kid is growing out of his nice pants. Then their is the picking stuff up and putting it where it belongs. That is why mom’s know where everything is, because if they didn’t, their world would be that much more difficult. 

Doing all of this is a part of my job and it gives me the sense that I can wing other things because I feel like I’m winging everyday parenting life sometimes. However, sometimes my winging it totally fails even when I feel like it was awesome. Such is the case with today’s art presentation. Luckily, I’m not that bothered and I’ll spend a lot more time making sure the equipment works better next time. That, right there, is the joy of today’s occurrence. I can’t change how my presentation went. It’s done and over with. And so I move on. I wish I was that good at accepting all the the things I’m not all that good at. In time, I hope. 

Writing an album

All of my boys love to listen to music, dance to music, play or attempt to play music. Recently, Ansel has taken to writing his own songs via Garage Band with assistance from me. We listen to beats and put them together then play them back and make needed tweaks. Once a song is finished, Ansel names it and we import it to iTunes where we add it to our music library.  It’s fun to see him understand what it means to be an “artist” and how an album comes about. He’s also learning what it means to be famous and how that can affect one’s life. The other day he said to me, “Mom, perhaps (he uses this word a lot lately) I want to write music but don’t want to be famous. I want to walk around without being bothered.” Sounds good to me!

Oliver helped make a CD “case” and Ansel did the writing and created the paper grid artwork. 

The Flying Stars album is a work in progress, but it’s showing great promise. 

His song titles are the best! Don’t Down was his first track and it includes vocals from him and Ian. Oxelmation shows true originality and has some amazing club beats. The songs that follow are similar with some instrumentals from Ansel mixed in. The whole album is expected to be dynamic and surprising, experimental and refined. I told him musicians can take a year plus to complete an album to which he responded, “I definitely won’t take that long.”The expected release date is January 2019. 

This musician is a busy guy!

Hills and mountains

The still air of those lazy, hazy days of summer has been kicked up by a wonderful breeze that’s been moving the air for a few days. With that breeze, we’ve taken to the hills and mountains around our home. 

Playing in a dry riverbed always soothes the souls after a long week. Oliver was Mr. T as he picked up this massive log. 

Ansel loves to mountain bike in the hills close to home. He calls it the “close hike” and we walk here often. 

Ian enjoys a good walk too. Here he was the king of trees standing tall on a stump. Look at that face!

Ages 9, 5, and 2; and great company.