I'm a musician!

If your in-laws have recently arrived for a month-long visit and your house is topsy-turvey, or if the scale says you've put on five pounds though you've been dieting for the past two weeks, if you can't draw to save your life and your last cake fell because you can't bake either...here is an instant confidence-booster:

Learn to play the recorder. Right now. In about five minutes. Then go play a song. It feels great!

I have been procrastinating. For about a year. Since adopting many Waldorf ways to our home setting a year or so ago, I have been avoiding the recorder. Waldorf schools begin their day in singing or playing the recorder. Doesn't that sound lovely? I would love to start our days in music, but poetry is as close as we were coming, and that was pretty good. Besides, I had to master it myself before I could teach the children, and I simply had no time for one more thing. Sure, my daughter taught herself and my husband can pick it up and play it. And once upon a time I played it as a small child with my mother's tutelage. The plan was to work on it some day, when I had a minute, and "layer it in" as our homeschool consultant advises of each new endeavor.

I checked out a book on flutes and recorders from the library. Yesterday, with hubby and parents out of the house, I picked up the once-renewed, about-to-be-due book, turned to the finger chart and played through the exercises on the first page. Then I zipped through the second, third and last page and thought; huh, I can do this. I pulled the only recorder book I could find off the shelf; a Christmas duet book I'd ordered a few years ago when my dd decided she would learn recorder. It is May and I know we have other recorder books somewhere in this playroom, but I was not about to argue with fate or reorganize my library. Ten minutes later I was playing "Away in a Manger."

Victory! My kind of instrument!

Yes, friend, you too can play music, you too can make melodious your household each morning...Karen Carpenter was right...and even if you cannot and should not sing (like me), you can play the recorder. Go on, find yourself a $2.50 recorder (rainbowresource.com has a couple at this price), check out a book at the library, and you'll be on your way!