Picture This Dinner: A Concert of Sorts

Late last year we received a note home from Allison's school about piano lessons. They were going to be offering them after school once a week. Allison had talked about wanting to learn to play the piano a few times and since she didn't really take to gymnastics, ballet or tap I thought piano might be a good activity for her to try out. So starting this past January she had piano lessons every Monday after school. I figured, if nothing else, it's a good starter class to see if she is interested and if we should pursue it further. They even gave her a keyboard to take home and practice with. That sounds great and all but every Monday she had to schlep the keyboard into school so she would have it for her lesson. The problem is that Allison is a small person, and this keyboard was big...and the bag it was in was even bigger. As most of you know, Allison has a hard enough time walking into the school (she still won't do it alone) but ask her to bring a ginormous keyboard with her and hell brakes loose. After a couple weeks we came up with a solution - after dropping Allison off Jeff would take the keyboard to the front office and leave it there. Then, if we were lucky, someone (perhaps a safety) would bring it to her classroom or when it was time for her lesson she would walk with someone to the front office to retrieve it. I'd say about 80% of the time this worked. The other 20% of the time she just ended up sharing a piano with someone else in the class because her piano was still sitting up at the front office. Anyway, despite the issues with carrying the piano around, Allison seemed to be enjoying her lessons. She even enjoyed practicing at home and playing songs for us. Well, her lessons ended this week and everyone that was involved in the program put on a short performance for all the parents. This also included students who had been practicing guitar and violin. I wasn't really sure what to expect since they've only been practicing for a few months. All I knew was that Allison was going to be playing "Mary had a Little Lamb". Well, the concert was interesting, to say the least. Not the most organized event and when they had the violins playing the same time as the other instruments all you could really hear was a lot of squealing but it was cute nonetheless. So here is Allison, along with several other people playing "Mary had a Little Lamb". The music that you hear in the beginning is the background music...trust me, you'll know when they start playing. It's good they all played in a group, that way you couldn't tell who was messing up. You'll also notice two kids play on one keyboard. One was playing on the high notes and the other on the low notes. So here is the video of Allison's "concert":

And here's the second part:

And lastly here is the whole group playing "We will Rock You". It appears that Allison is staring into space during the while song but she said she was playing notes for "Rock you...rock you..."

After the concert I took a picture of Allison and her kindergarten classmate Shawn. Notice the height difference? Allison is one of the shortest kids in the class and Shawn is one of the tallest.