Musical Meltdowns

I've been waiting on our choir information coming through so I can organize the rest of my life. Well it's finally arrived & I've gone into meltdown. Dearest has remained calm & in control. I knew it would be bad, just not how bad.

There are the tutoring fees. OK, those I knew about & I knew how bad they would be. It was the hidden costs I was worried about & there are plenty of those. There are the little costs for a folder & pencils. There are the minimal costs for a make~up case ~ hairspray, deoderant, comb, brush, bobby pins, elastics, foundation, lipstick & then there are the uniforms; uniforms, plural ~ 3 uniforms to be exact, all expensive, all requiring tailoring at our expense. Why is music so jolly expensive? We haven't even got onto the flute part of this exercise yet.

Why bother? Well firstly that little gem about training up a child in the way he should go has wider applications in my view than the usual one about teaching them about God. I think God wants us to know our children well enough that we know how God has designed them & train them accordingly so that they might fulfill His purposes. Then there is the purely practical. The child who can't concentrate long enough to write a sentence without digressing before she gets to the end of it is always singing, humming, whistling & has supurb concentration for music. She has a phenominal musical memory.

Several years ago I bought Amadeus to show Ditz something of Mozart's life & the times he lived in . We have suffered ever since from Ditz's rendition of the aria from the Magic Flute ~ on pitch.
She could & can sing the theme from LOTR all the way through; actually any of a number of movie themes. She has an extensive range & can hit notes at either end of the scale her teachers can't. Sadly we began music because I am a mathamatical moron & figured music would help Ditz's math (the jury's still out on that one!) We perservered because music seemed to be helping with the attention deficiet (now we know why!) & the self discipline was good for Ditz.

I feel like the tiny honeyeater mummy who found herself trying to raise a cuckoo chick. I thought I was starting to get a handle on this child raising circuis. I've done 3 kinesthetic learners (the 'we don't come to school to learn; we come to socilize & play sport' trio); I've done 3 dyslexics (all my boys have various degrees of dyslexia), the 'Rose amongst the Thorns' dilemma (go play soccer on the oval with your brothers dear because if I find you making googly eyes at the boys in play time there will be BIG trouble.) And then I got Ditz, the sparkly lilac nail polish, canary singing, hair draping, emotional bomb & it's like I'm clueless.

Which is why I am clutching a dozen foolscap pages that begin...Attendence at rehearsals is compulsory. A doctors certificate is required... wondering how I got here & what on earth I think I'm doing.

Now badly as Ditz wants to do all this she is a sensitive soul & acutely aware of our financial situation so she has been buzzing in my ear, softly so as not to worry her father, 'Are you sure we can do this, mummy? It's an awful lot of money.' No I'm not sure, but Dearest is the money man & he says it's all under control. But I can tell you this, girl. You owe me. Big time.