Trying to make a birthday gift..

Was practicing a song on the guitar to play to San as a birthday gift. My trusted aid for this kind of secret activity is Jr.

However the little one cannot stand having anyone else in front of the video camera these days...

My grandma used to complain that her singing came to an end after I was born! Used to think maybe there was a curse on me and that is why any attempt to sing seriously would stop after a year max!

Now, I say the same thing that my grandma used to say. You can see for yourself what I possibly did to grandmas music sessions based on what the little one is doing to me.

Did you see how she sang "should I off your plug.. should I off your plug.." to the same tune?

So much for all that practice.

Sangeetha heard it and said "nice.. still needs more polishing"!

We will keep the polishing going till next year.

Kids, what can we tell you?!

ps. A akka gets the credit for playing this on Piano..figured out the notes from her piano playing and used my cheat sheet.

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Opportunity

A friends daughter who is in middle school showed a small demo of how she does her music homework. They have a software site to log on to, and once they log on, the "sheet music" for the homework shows up. They play the musical instrument in front of the laptop and the mic pics it up. If they hit the right notes in sequence, the notes keep lighting up in green. If they hit wrong notes, it shows the note they hit in red and helps them correct.

The teacher grades this online and they know which note is a problem for the student (which they hit consistently wrong) and suggests methods to help them improve!

The software also gives student sheet music access to hundreds of music books.

If I had access to anything like this during my student days, can totally imagine spending hours on this and practicing.

Now when you are older and can afford a music lesson and can with difficulty make time (because your kids can do a lot of things by themselves), your ability to learn a new language like sheet music is more difficult.

Jr. and the little one are going to be given the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of music so they can understand and explore. What they make of it later as they grow older is up to them. We will at least try to give them the basics...

Sometimes, we live through our kids. This is one of those things...

1. They are not going to wait till they are 30 to learn how to swim.
2. They will get to learn Carnatic music formally
3. They can learn dance if they want to and can keep up with it

and now

4. they will get to learn how to read sheet music and the notation.

and maybe Daddy will learn with them...

Hey, I am just old, not dead!

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Integrating things

A friend asked me how I got the Little One to sing songs and pronounce them accurately.

It was possible only by breaking it to word level, sometimes to sub word level and then putting it all together one sentence at a time.

All complex things can be broken down to simpler items.

The ability to make something complex out of simple things and the ability to understand and troubleshoot a complex entity/problem by breaking it to simpler parts is a skill set you develop (or have to develop) if you have kids.

When dealing with scientific things or logical things, it purely is an exercise in

a. right questioning and answering
b. data driven decision making
c. nomenclature or terminology used to explain things

Then you end up with things neither scientific nor logical with an audience that is very challenging (say the little one and Jr.) and all your experience as a student, teacher, integration dude, etc. is not enough!

We are talking now about the heaven phone (which was misquoted by Jr. as the Hanuman phone) that is used to call "Kollu thatha"(great grandpa) who is no longer with us.

Unable to handle the situation myself at that time of his death, I made the mistake of telling the little one that the only way to talk to Thatha now is to call him on the "heaven" phone and it is very expensive to even reach the phone which is somewhere on top of the Himalaya mountains and even after we reach the phone, there is a very long line of kids waiting to call their Thatha's and Paati's and it is also very expensive to make that call because longer the distance you call, more expensive it gets.

The little one promptly cut through my logic with many razor sharp questions like "if it is that far away and thatha already wears thick glasses, how can he be watching us? how will he know how to help us if we pray to him in times of trouble like you told us to do?" etc. etc.

Based on the experience of creating a bunch of statements in trying to bridge the gap between what is known and what is unknown, and trying to explain things to the little one, a small book can be published on the "do's and dont's" in communicating with children under the age of 5 on the topic of death, afterlife, etc.

The best line from her was "so now that thatha is in the ocean, he will come out when we go to the beach? It is all the same ocean right?"

Got visions of my Thatha's dissolving bone fragments in the Bay of Bengal, then reassembling the fragments and him reappearing in Half moon bay and walking out of the ocean, Terminator style!

It is hilarious and sad at the same time to see how Jr. corrects the little one with her knowledge of heaven.

Don't have the guts to break things in a harsh way to the kids. Who am I to decide if heaven is a bad place or not, what amenities are available, if you can still read without your glasses and walk without your walking stick etc. etc.

Since no one who has actually made it to heaven is going to writing us any books, maybe, I will write that book someday! Of course it will be all made up..

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