Turning the page to February

This week I hope to be re-establishing some sort of routine after an unusual and stressful month. The Mobtown Modern event last Wednesday ("More Than Words") went well, although the particular piece that I was rehearsing had to be cut from the program. I had underestimated the difficulty of the music (selections from "Pierrot Lunaire" by Arnold Schoenberg), and so had several of the musicians I had hired for the ad hoc ensemble. Rather than go forward with a performance that felt shaky, we decided to postpone the work for a future event. The experience was painful, given the time put in by all, but a necessary learning experience for a few of us. The show on Wednesday went ahead without the Pierrot Redux project and turned out to be near perfect, in spite of the cancellation and horrible weather. Superb performances were given by special guests Wendy Richman, Tim Feeney, Ken Ueno, and Julieanne Klein (who stayed at our house for four nights), traveling here for the show from New York, New Jersey, and California. Despite a mixed review by the Baltimore Sun classical music critic who covers most of our events, all the performers and audience members that I talked to felt great about how it went.

The cat that I mentioned at the end of my last post, KeeKee, had to return to her previous owners yesterday. To start with, it turns out that Marie is allergic to cats. The pooping problem had also escalated in the past several days, with four incidents on our bedroom carpet. This expansion of her bathroom territory occurred after we had to move the litterbox into our room for the time while our friend Julieanne stayed with us (another, more severe cat allergy). I kept the litterbox very clean, at least whenever I was home, so I'm not sure why this occurred. Some cats are just special. Anyway, this was not a happy experience for anyone.

Mila, on the other hand, has been making huge strides in her use of the toilet. I'm really proud of her growing independence. Her vocabulary and use of sentences has also been increasing a lot this past month, as I mentioned before. The behavioral issues have not been as major this past week, and she has been apologizing occasionally after incidents do occur. I see her developing a sense of what is right and wrong, while still testing our reactions as parents. We work daily on helping Mila to understand her feelings and to be in control her actions. With the return of some normalcy to our weekly routine, I'm very aware of the need to diversify our days with a lot of different types of learning. The cold weather is a deterent to being outside, but we do have free entrance to the Science Museum during January and February with our Zoo pass. We are also taking Music Together classes, which provide a lot of songs and activities for us to practice. During down time, Mila also enjoys reading to herself almost as much as she enjoys being read to. In this we feel extremely lucky.