A view from our living room window...This has been the most intense month in awhile, with deadlines on two major projects, the beginning of my second semester teaching at MICA, a succession of beloved friends and family visiting our home from afar in the past few weeks, and a family trip down to DC for Obama's inauguration. Next Wednesday is the Mobtown Modern event "More Than Words", for which I am organizing a performance of Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" in a remixed arrangement. I need to create 7 interludes of 30 seconds each-- based on samples of the instrumental parts, plus a plan for live electronic processing using the ever-handy Kaoss Pad.
Mila has brought her own brand of chaos in recent days, with some new testing behaviors that have led me to again commit myself to reading "Easy To Love, Difficult To Discipline". I need some strategies in which I can feel more confident. Some toddler behaviors that I'm currently struggling to figure out how to respond to: face-hitting/smushing/pinching/pushing, smacking the keyboard of the laptop while Daddy is at the computer, and intentional spilling at the table. These behaviors don't happen all that often, but at least once every few days. I know it has been somewhat stressful for Mila to have Mommy returning to work after a longish government holiday with guests at our place.
At the same time that these boundary-pushing tricks have been arising, Mila has been blossoming in her verbal communication skills. She has been making friends with some of our longtime friends and referring to them by name, which is really touching.
In the past few weeks we have had visits from Becka and Pete (moving from Pittsburgh to Portland, Oregon), Nani and Grandpa (my parents, who took the train from Iowa), and Paul and Garrett (visiting from Kentucky for the inauguration). Next week we will be hosting Julieanne, our singer friend from New Jersey who is singing on the Mobtown Modern concert. I hope to have new pictures and video up soon, but this may be all that I can manage in the next couple of weeks. Times are both crazy and giddy with excitement at the same time.
Mila has been saying she wants to play with Obama's kids. She got a pretty close view of Sasha passing by during the presidential motorcade procession. Our day down there was both awe-inspiring and one of the more challenging physical ordeals in recent memory. I was not impressed with the organization of the event so far as crowd management by the Capitol Police and Homeland Security was concerned, leading to some fairly dangerous situations amid mislabeled dead ends and third-rate megaphones. Anyway, that's a whole other story. I am definitely hoping for a new vision of what this country is about, and am interested to see how this new ethic of public service plays out, but my head is mostly going to be in my work on the home kitchen front first. Then I'll worry about my students, then... oh, the new cat just pooped on the carpet. Talk to you later.
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