Right after breakfast, Phil and I headed up for another day of wrestling through our stuff. The big, hours-long task for today was to hang shelves enough to store our agriculture books. At first we only had four shelves' worth, but I kept finding more, stashed here and there, until we finally did have all six or seven shelves populated.
I was exclaiming once again about the number of books that we have, when Phil suddenly laughed. "We have five careers, and they all are reference-work intensive." That's true.
- Phil's engineering career: a full wall of books (maybe two), along with equipment, files, and drawings.
- Phil's farming career: a full wall of books, on every subject we could think of: rabbiits, worms, soil, cattle, sheep, goats, cheese-making, bees, pigs, chickens, marketing, market gardening. Not to mention a vast range of unusual building techniques and two barns worth of materials.
- My curriculum development career: that might be the most book-intensive of all, as I receive probably 30 or 40 boxes annually. I can keep up with the boxes of catalogs to cull through to find books, and I can usually keep up with at least a cursory glance at the books that come my way to review (most get donated within a few minutes). But books that I might think are worth reading, though perhaps not "on the clock"—those gradually add up. I have about two full bookcases worth of those. Which isn't bad, considering how many, many books I receive. But ... I don't know that most people have two bookcases of unread-but-eagerly-awaiting reading books!
- My health career (well, in training for): I started with instruction in nutrition; then a cursory study in herbs (I have plenty more books to get through), and, more voluminously, study material for homeopathy.
- My teaching career: as I teach the boys in our one-room schoolhouse, I have almost all materials necessary from PreK to college prep. Not only books but art supplies, science supplies, multiple math programs, and so on.
Then, too, both Phil and I are readers by nature. Since we've been married, he's delved deeply into the Civil War (to use its most common name), economics, and the Bible. I tend to prefer missionary biographies, natural healing, literature.
And we're doing our best to raise readers, so we try to keep a range of books on hand for the boys.
No wonder it always feels like we have another box or ten of books to unpack. That's because we do!
***
As part of this unpacking, I was interested to see how there were a few answers to prayer right before me. One of those was how to keep Abraham moving forward with his passion. Abraham loves art so much, he does it for hours each day, just for fun.
He has outgrown the developmentally appropriate stick-figure phase (apparently, children around the world draw stick figures until somewhere around age 7, even if they have been trained in shading and foreshortening and such; the stick figures are a way of processing their growing up). He loves pencil and colored pencil work, but even with that, I've wondered about the next step.
Silly me! I have a whole collection of art programs. I might need to restock a few of the require supplies, but I can definitely support some art projects even now. I also have drawing instruction, watercolor instruction. And what else would art instruction at this age look like, beyond an introduction to artists, mediums, and generally just practice? (I'm hoping not much more, but if you have any additional thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them.)
Another was, generally, how to increase the structured time in each boy's day. I am gratefult that they overall enjoy each other's company enough that they can spend two days in a row, eight hours or more a day, playing Legos with an elaborate setup. That has allowed Phil and I to work together while the weather remains dry. And yet, the equivalent of a full-time job, just playing, is probably not ideal. So ... science supplies. Poi (synchronized movements of balls on the end of a string, used by the Maori for improved coordination). Books on math or engineering/construction.
And one more big one.
***
We moved our piano from Boulder to Virginia. A Yamaha upright, we loved the sound, and we bought it second-hand in the days before Craigslist, so we paid more for it than perhaps we would have today. It's been under wraps and piles of stuff for four and a half years at this point.
I mentioned before how little damage it sustained during storage. Today was the day to attempt to move it. The weather was probably pushing 50, but only the top inch had thawed. Phil tried to grade and got nowhere. This is one of the longer stretches without rain that we've enjoyed, and the wet weather is predicted next week. We cleared out the entire back of the storage trailer. Phil brought the tractor over and put the forks inside.
We hadn't anticipated that the wheels would have rusted into place. so joggling the piano free would have been impossible for me. (I tried). Phil was able to move it, but gasped at how very heavy it was. Once the coasteres were free of their rust-prison, though, we both could manipulate the piano. Barely.
Phil draped the forks with a moving blanket; we pushed the piano to the back of the forks, and Phil ratcheted it down. He managed to back the piano out of storage trailer without hitting it on either side. That was impressive. Due to the placement of the RV, he couldn't face in straight, so he had to back out at and angle, while keeping the piano and forks straight.
Honestly, I didn't watch this. I had to watch some of the driving to get the piano into the French doors, and that was almost too much for me. Even now, hours later, my stomach is in knots just thinking about it.
Here's the situation: the doors open about six feet. The piano is right about six feet wide. And it had to be put in the wide way because Phil is not strong enough, with my help, to carry the piano. so getting it close to the door is one of those "an inch is the same as a mile" type situations, where a piano a foot away from the door might as well still be up in the storage trailer, because it is not coming inside.
Phil probably drove forward and backward close to ten times, tires clogged with that top inch of mud. Joe had dug a random (deep) hole, and Phil's back tires kept going over that.
I truly don't know how he managed to get the tractor forks in the door without damaging anything. The space was so tight that he literally almost could not undo the ratchet strap because there was not wiggle room there. After a few more tense moments, though, he somehow managed to shift something, and undid it.
And then the piano was inside!
We vacuumed the mouse droppings out of the back, and I wiped it down again. We pulled it into its place in the playroom. And then we had music (or maybe that should be "music") for most of the hours until the end of day.
I don't remember much from childhood piano lessons, but I could show the proper fingering for scales. Jadon practiced scales, though the younger boys did not. I figured out the circle of fifths again (phew! It had been a while). And we watched the first lesson in Piano for Quitters, a technique of teaching that is like what Mozart and Beethoven would have learned. Start with chords, and let people simply play real, improvised music from the very beginning. It makes practicing a joy, becuase you're playing good-sounding stuff.
I have never found the time to get all the way through those piano lessons (making me a quitter even of Piano for Quitters), but I remember the last time I tried I was thrilled that, as long as I could find chord notations, I could improvise music for hymns after only a few days, something I never accomplished in childhood practicing.
***
So my day was most excellent. Even the beginning, when I woke up surrounded by a few more bodies than had been in bed when I fell asleep.
Phil's was pretty good, right up until the evening. In mid-afternoon, he had run to Scottsville to get a few plumbing pieces. We moved the heavy cast-iron tub down once the piano was in, because Phil realized, with the tile now done, he could finish that up and soak away any residual stress. (That has been one of the hardest aspects of Phil's life here: no tub. I never mastered the art of multiple-hour soaks; after fifteen or twenty minutes, I'm ready to be done.)
Incredibly, in order to make the tub fit through the door, he had to inch the island out of the way. So Phil put his back to it and pushed the island, fully stocked, about a half inch.
After dinner, he was ready to hook everything up, only to realize that the pee trap he thought he had, he didn't have.
How frustrating! He could easily have picked one up, had he thought he needed it, but soaking will have to wait.
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