Fab having piano lessons on the real piano today. Also good to have some encouragement from Anna’s teacher as she’s planning to do a couple of music auditions soon, which we’re madly preparing for, having left it all to the last minute as per usual.

And tonight I am hoping for just enough snow in Devon tomorrow to make it too dangerous for our school buses to run – I know we’ve only just gone back to school but an unexpected day off is always welcome!

I am so chuffed, it’s long been one of my dreams to have a real piano in the house, I love it. Thank you Bonners, and Steve for finally coming round to the idea!

The Debussy piano piece that I’ve loved listening to over the past few weeks can be found somewhere nearby We’ll record it properly when our own piano is fully installed.

Abbie, however, was pleased with her performance – she gets quite nervous at these things, and the piano in this church is particularly awful, so despite mistakes she did really well

Josiah doesn’t have lessons with this teacher any more, since he changed schools, so no performance from him today. I’ll have to try and record some of his piano playing when the new piano arrives, as he’s improved a fair bit recently as well.

Apart from that little concert today we’ve had a relatively (and much-needed) laid back day, getting a bit of housework done; the girls both had sleepovers with friends last night so swapped back this morning. Ending the day with a film, dinner, and then baths and bed all round.

So, Steve finally decided what sort of piano he’d like to get, after reading a bit around it. According to our piano teacher, the Clavinova (weighted keys and piano action no less!) that we have upstairs is not going to be good enough to take the kids through the higher grades. I’ve been wanting a real piano for ages but it took for Anna to get to that stage before Steve would even think about it!

Anyway, after coming to a conclusion we sent a quick email to our friends at Bonners Music, just to check that we weren’t about to make a huge blunder. We had a prompt email back verifying that we’d made a good choice and also offering us one of that exact model which they’d just had back in part exchange! No brainer there then – Steve said yes almost immediately.

So it’s all happening rather faster than I’d imagined, with a piano potentially arriving very soon! It’s going in our back room downstairs, which really needs decorating anyway, so it was stupid to wait. We called our friendly household maintenance person who said he could come in two days! RIGHT! (best Basil Fawlty voice) RIGHT!

So we had to clear the room in rather manic fashion, after work and fitted around the usual music lessons, food shopping, etc. The dresser from that room has had to be fitted into the conservatory, in a space where Steve always said it would fit (I disagreed). I’m not sure who was right if he’s only made it fit by taking off skirting boards and hacking a corner out of the end of the windowsill! But it’s there now, and won’t move until we do! Everything else has been stacked in the conservatory while the room is decorated. Not entirely sure where the rest of the furniture will fit in the room afterwards, but we’ll work that out later. Games and books have been squirreled away in an orderly fashion

Other things I would like to blog about if I had time but I probably won’t get around to it:

That was excellent enough but tonight Joe got tired of waiting so phoned his violin teacher to find out that he also got a distinction for his grade 3, with a grand score of 134, currently the household record for ABRSM exams.

Huge well done to both of them, they both worked really hard in the run up to these exams so I’m really pleased for them

In the next three weeks, between us we have two music exams, two orchestra concerts, two ‘teacher’ concerts, a choral event for which the kids are singing extra stuff and I have now been asked to accompany. Oh, and Anna’s got the panto performance which is terribly music heavy and she is practicing *all* the time. We need another piano so that I can practice too!

Not to mention parents evenings (theirs), school fete (mine; we have to attend as one of our work days), and panto auditions (for some reason they are doing these, against my better judgment!). Of course Russ is on holiday during the next two weeks so Steve has next to no flexibility. And my work is more stressy than usual at the moment due to all our children’s reviews mucking up timetables and creating staffing issues. Argh!

Oh well, a bit of pressure never hurt anyone. It will all stop at the end of term, and then the next lot of stress can start – decorating

This weekend has been pleasant though. Saturday was orchestra with added committee meeting, then an afternoon with friends and an evening with more friends. It was Ruth’s 40th party down at the Turf, and a lovely opportunity to catch up with people I haven’t seen for ages.

Steve was off racing, and managed to win the class as well as break the class hill record too. Not bad considering that all his direct competitors have raced the hill before, and it was his first time there. It is kind of frustrating that he’s turning out to be so good at this darned racing lark!

This morning we decided to have a slow start followed by some homework time – Abbie’s got a ‘Britain in the 1960s’ project to do, so she made a start on that, while Anna had various bits and bobs of work to get done, and Josiah did a nice long music practice.

Got the first concert out of the way this afternoon; their cello/piano teacher’s pupil concert. For the grandparents, me to look back on, and anyone else who’s interested and wants to waste 6 minutes (there are worse ways to waste time but not many!), here are videos:

Came home for a bit more sorting out (laundry, argh, bane of my life, still haven’t finished it!), tea, and then we watched The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Don’t want to leave spoilers for anyone who’s not seen it or read the book, but it is recommended by all of us here, but it *will* make you cry.

Finally, for the record. My iPhone lives in my pocket, usually, therefore I am never frightened of losing it, I love it so much that I keep very good track of it. Also, as it would always be in my pocket, I wouldn’t ever have to grab it on the way out of a burning house! Anna’s cello is worth far less than Joe’s violin and also she’d be getting a full size one before too long in any case. So that clears up that little matter, and the rest of the questions were incidental, really – I had trouble making up my own mind which one to mark as ‘correct’ in most places!

And this morning, she disappeared off to school but not to school – instead she caught a lift to a maths day held by the South West HEI Excellence Hub – a day of doing, thinking, and talking maths. She loved it and came home buzzing, ready to try out lots of mathematical tricks on me. And she’d apparently found out that 13 x 7 is 28

On Monday I had the day off – an ‘occasional’ day, traditionally stuck at the end of November in order to help with Christmas shopping. As the years go by I am doing less and less Christmas shopping at all, much less in town, so I didn’t bother. Instead I got a few jobs done, cleaned the house a bit, went to Sainsbury’s, and that was about all.

Tuesday and Wednesday passed without anything out of the ordinary happening; on Thursday my class got to have an extra bus day so we went up to Haldon Forest Park and did the Play Trail with the kids which was fun. Showed them all a geocache, a couple of them were impressed with my hidden ‘treasure box’. Tiredness setting in all round by this stage in the week, Anna had a great moment when she realised she had done her art homework (draw a portrait of someone that you live with) for fun a couple of weeks ago so she could skip that!

Friday was Anna’s day off as her school had a non-pupil day – her first day of being home alone. In fact she arranged to spend the morning with one friend at her house, then the afternoon here with another friend, so she wasn’t really alone at all!

Into the weekend, full of music as ever. Saturday was orchestra rehearsal for the girls, errands and cleaning guinea pigs out for Joe & me, and then a Youth Orchestra concert at our local parish church’s Christmas Fair – so handily close to home. Actually it was really good for the youth orchestra to play for a prolonged time, usually they just get a spot during the main children’s orchestra’s concerts. They sounded great and it was nice to look around the stalls while they were playing. Bought some jam

Today we didn’t do much, everyone is tired, and I’m feeling particularly run down with sore throat etc. Garage is very slow at the moment so this leads to general down-ness in our household too. Still, we all went into town in the afternoon for the kids’ cello/piano teacher’s pupil concert. This is always a laid back affair and it is quite nice to see how all her pupils are progressing, as we’ve known most of them for a few years now. Video is long but varied, not without its mistakes, either, but I like to have video as a record anyway, don’t really care if it’s not perfect!

Anna plays the 2nd movement of Rieding’s Concerto in B minor on the cello, simply not practiced as she wasn’t aware that she was playing it (never mind that it’s one of her Grade 5 pieces which she’s taking on Wednesday, no matter! there will be some serious practice between now and then). That’s followed by Abbie playing a Round Dance by Bartok on the piano – I particularly like the dynamics at the beginning of this piece but then it went a little bit awol – tbh it is a slightly strange piece anyway I think! Josiah plays ‘Minnie Mouse hits town’ by Pam Wedgewood (from Upgrade 0 – 1, quite a nice book if anyone’s at that sort of level), suffering a bit from ‘not my usual piano’ syndrome as I know he can play it perfectly, then Anna finishes up with La Chevaleresque by Burgmuller.

And now it’s almost December, advent calendars at the ready