Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Immersion

I'm finally back to the real world. I'm somehow surprised to find that not everyone plays a string instrument and I don't have to attend parent lectures every day.

Taking the kids to a Suzuki violin institute was well worth the time and cost. It was quite an interesting week. Not only were the kids inspired but I was reminded of the very important reasons why we started all this violin stuff in the first place.

It was a week of immersion. I haven't spent a week of pure immersion like that since my days of spring training for softball. It was...kind of freeing. There were no computers. I didn't take any phone calls. I didn't watch any television.

It was just me and my family. And it was good.

My mom met us there, to help me get two kids through four classes a day. She loved watching their group lessons and play-ins. Unfortunately she missed their solo recitals and concerts.

In the middle of the night on Wednesday she got a call from my father. My father lost his sight in one eye this past year due to diabetes. That night his other eye "blew". He had to have emergency surgery to try and save his sight, so my mom took off for the ten hour drive back to her home.

She was a wreck and the kids were sad.

My father is going to have to wait about three weeks to see if his eye heals at all.

But I'm back with a new sense of purpose and lots of decisions to make. And a weeks' worth of reflection to help make them.

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