After a little over a year of playing, today Kylie has informed me that she no longer wants to play violin. She called me this morning while she was on the way to Aunt Melissa’s for the day and she said she doesn’t want to play anymore and asked if that was ok. Even though it makes me very sad as I thought she was doing very well and I personally love the sound of violin and fiddle music, I have no desire to force her to do something she is not interested in, so today will be her last day. She will go tonight and talk with Aerial, her instructor, and say good bye. Mommy and I think that this may just be a set back caused by the unstructured nature of summer break and are hoping that she might pick it back up once school starts up again in the fall. We think this because it seems since school let out Kylie has been getting a little more unfocused on the violin and we think it is due to the lack of structure during the rest of her day on Monday and in the other days of the week. I guess we will just have to wait and see what happens come fall, personally I hope she picks it back up.

Today was a very busy day, mainly for Kylie and partially due to last night. Tiffany called me this morning to tell me that she is fairly certain that Kylie has an ear infection. Last night Kylie had a very hard time sleeping because every time she laid down she started to cry because her head was hurting. Unfortunately due to a lot of past experience for both Mommy and Daddy, we both recognize this as a tell tale sign of an ear infection. So they were heading off to urgent care to have it verified and get some medicine to help her feel better. Fast forward an hour later and we have a confirmed ear infection and apparently what would have been another case of strep in a few days had she not had the ear infection. They prescribed her some amoxicillin which will treat both the ear infection and the onset of strep, so she should be good in a few days, and hopefully tonight she will sleep a lot better.

After all of that we still had something very exciting to new today; Kylie’s first violin recital! She was the third to perform and she did wonderful! At the time when I was sitting in the audience watching her on stage all by herself playing Twinkle Twinkle as Pepperoni Pizza I was so proud and happy! But as I sat watching the rest of the recital I noticed something, when many of the other kids were up performing their recitals their teachers were with them, but when Kylie was up there she was alone. Afterwords I found out that Kylie’s teacher (Aerial) had asked Kylie if she wanted her to go up and perform with her and Kylie said “No, I want to go by myself” and so she did! When all the students were done performing their recitals we all went to Roma’s to have some pizza and celebrate. Here is a video of Kylie’s performance that Mommy was able to get with her camera.

Kylie had her first violin lesson today, and it went very well. She is taking lessons at Marshall Music in Allen Park, her teacher’s name is Ariel. Once a week (Monday’s) she has a half hour long private lesson; for the first 20 minutes Kylie and Ariel practice what they have already learned in the previous week and add something new to the lesson that builds upon it, and then for the last 10 minutes we can come in to see what she’s learned.

At the end of today’s lesson Ariel came out to get Mommy to bring her back to listen and said Kylie did fantastic and that she was already ahead of where other kids her age typically are. Ariel normally doesn’t teach the bow until about the second month because the child learns about the strings, the parts of the violin and how to hold it and looking at music before they throw the bow into the mix, however this is not the case with Kylie. She said she can really tell that Mommy has been working with Kylie, because she was able to use the bow today and her hold is just about perfect. Kylie is able to use the bow properly for the most part and she will get better with practice. So today Kylie learned what a 1/4 rest was and what the repeat bar looks like; she also learned how to pizzicato (to pluck the string). We also got a book for Kylie to use and practice with both at home and during lessons. Ariel is excited that Mommy can help to reinforce the lessons at home because she also plays the violin; Ariel said that Kylie will learn faster that way and she really looks forward to watching her grow musically.