who's bright idea was this anyway?

I have a wonderful, active, smart, beautiful, funny and talented six-year-old son.  His name is Elijah, and he goes by Eli most of the time.  I'm kinda proud of him.  You know, typical mom ish.

Anyway, he's always loved music.  The last eight or nine months, he started asking for two things consistently: 1.) turntables (yeah, I kno....wtf?) and 2.) a guitar.  Well, for Christmas he got the guitar.  (Again, wtf? I musta been temporarily insane, you say?)  But what good is a guitar if you don't know how to play it (besides the obvious use in assaulting parental ears).

So it took all of January to find a guitar teacher in the area that would take a student his age.  There was one in the area who first said, sure no prob, but they teach Suzuki Method and want ALL of their students to start on the violin, and Eli had no interest in the violin "It's screechy, Mom."  Most of the other teachers didn't think he was old enough to have the attention span, the discipline or the rhythm for learning an instrument.    But there was finally one, at Mike's Music in Carbondale, IL, who said let's see what the kid can do.  And said instructor was duly impressed with the boy.  So, we have a teacher.

Now, this brings us to the pain of the situation.....practicing.  Thirty minutes of earpain daily.  Thirty minutes of arguing.  Thirty minutes of "Am I almost done yet?"  In short, thirty minutes in my own little hell.  Finger exercises, fretting exercises, tuning....Have I mentioned the arguing?

Well, we had a breakthrough today.  He came home from school, picked up his guitar and asked me to set the timer for his 30 minutes.  He told me he didn't want to "sound lame" at his lesson tomorrow.  (He's six, what does he know from lame?)  He went through all of his exercises without complaint, for the most part.  He still doesn't have any callouses built up on his fretting hand, so it's kinda painful.

I'm convinced he's up to something.  But for today, nobody received any bodily injury during guitar practice!

peace n blessings

a