Riley's Week 3 Summary

Hildegard-

So, here are a few quick details of this week of practice:

It seems that a little bit of The Maestro's honeymoon phase with his cello has worn off (a little dose of reality is good for me, right?). We've still been practicing 2x/day, except yesterday when, instead of practicing a second time, we ended up at the Dr's office for The Maestro to get 4 stitches on his jaw (totally unrelated to the cello of course…although that would make an interesting story…).

The Maestro is spontaneously singing more frequently, and more on key (as far as my under developed ear for notes can detect). He will sing Twinkle most of the way through, and will "Mississippi Hot Dog" through a line or two of Var. A. The Maestro really likes variety and silliness- so we're always switching the word that we sing after Mississippi. He'll sing a good portion of the parts of the cello. I don't know if any of this progress will show up at our lesson tomorrow, but it's nice to know that things are happening, even if my cello practice this afternoon was with a very musical kitty, instead of a little boy.

He has really loved being allowed to pizzicato, and much of the time can remember which is the C,G, and A strings. He actually hasn't been at all interested in learning letters before last Saturday, but I think as he's been trying to learn which string is which, his interest in learning letters in general has increased.
One isolated time, I held The Maestro's gaze for 10 seconds, but other than that, we are still not making much progress on that front.

The Maestro-Kitty has not been very interested in rest positions or "I Love My Cello", but so for the most part I've been modeling those, and when The Maestro does them, I've tried to be positive about the aspects that are looking good, which is mostly where he puts his hands. We'll keep working on it, and I'm hoping that when he gets so that he's ready for the bow (practice or real), that he'll be able to experience and appreciate why a solid rest position is so important.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow!

-Riley