For Them

I remember the first time stepping into the showroom and playing on their pianos. I was shy. I didn't know what "trying out pianos" really meant. I just walked from one instrument to the next and played a little tidbit of a piece I could remember at the time. My teacher didn't give me any guidelines to go off. We just played and arbitrarily said if we liked or didn't like it. 

We didn't end up buying a Steinway. A new baby grand 20 years ago was already $40,000+. The fact that my parents were even considering it is a little absurd for me to wrap my head around as an adult, but they prioritized our music education. That they did. I remember making a deal with my mother: if we didn't buy a Steinway, I wanted it to be a mahogany grand piano with a glossy finish. She said okay, but we didn't end up getting one with those aesthetic specifications either. We ended up buying one with a glossy black finish instead. 

That was the first time I stepped foot in their store. Since then, I've been to a different location multiple times but never to purchase an instrument. This year on Mother's Day, I came back again to this location. I drove myself and somehow miraculously found a parking spot in their tiny lot behind the store. I walked into the crowded showroom and found my student's parents. We sat together and excitedly waited.

They'd told me the night before already, but I was still slightly dumbfounded. Was my student really receiving the 1st prize in her division for her performance of a college-level piece? Going into this competition, we had prepared and worked hard, but the expectation was to have fun and enjoy performing a very challenging piece. I couldn't believe it when I heard she had placed, and not only had she placed, but she had been awarded 1st place within her division. 

I thought back to all the times when I had won my own piano competitions years ago as a student. Looking back as an adult now, it's very bittersweet because these memories are all tainted. I remember my teacher being proud when I won. I remember him being excited when I won. But I don't remember him being proud of me. I don't remember him being excited for me. He was proud of himself as a teacher and he was excited for his own reputation.

As a teacher, I don't focus on the competition. My students participate in festivals and take theory tests for their own personal growth. I've had lots of students do very well in these areas for many years. 

It makes me happy to be able to hand these out every time a festival concludes.
This year I handed out  24 total!

Theory medals!

It both surprises me and doesn't surprise me that my student won an award for her performance in a highly competitive competition. She's talented. I've known from the first day I met her five years ago. But more than that, I see her enthusiasm for music. I see her personality blossom in her music. These are things I can grow, but I cannot create. This credit goes to her.

It's bittersweet ending another school year of teaching. But I love getting to applaud their accomplishments and hand out awards. I know I play an important role in imparting knowledge, encouraging, and fostering their musical ability. But I also know I only see my students for no more than an hour a week. The other 167 hours in a week, they spend the way they wish. And it's their own dedication, motivation, and determination that fuels the rest of their learning.

I am proud of them. I am excited for them. 

Plant Babies

I don't have a green thumb. It's pretty black. I've had a lot of failed outdoor "experiments" over the years.

Astilbe: I thought we had a shady spot in our landscaping so I bought astilbe to plant. Little did I know that although this location received shade in the winter time, it received lots of afternoon sun in the summer time. Tricky huh? Blame the angle of the sun and the changing seasons...Unfortunately, the astilbe didn't make it because it was too hot. 

Gardenia: We bought a clearance pot of gardenia from the store and I took it home. I revived it and actually saw some new greenery starting to grow from the existing branches. Unfortunately, we had another frost that spring and I did not protect the plant properly so despite trying, it didn't make it. 

The nice part about experiments is that you just start over and try again whether it be the same or something different. So this spring, we tried again, and we tried something different.

1. Nasturtiums

Last Christmas, we visited our arboretum for their special winter displays. They also had a Santa's village set up for the children to explore. At the Santa's village, they were handing out packets of seeds in one of the houses. These seeds were nasturtiums. I kept them in a shelf, and then this spring, we planted them. I wasn't expecting much, but I figured you can't go wrong with good soil, water, and sunlight. Sure enough, they sprouted and started growing really well. 

Now I did start to notice that the leaves were getting eaten. I picked off the caterpillars for a day or two, but then I did some research online and read that gardeners will actually purposely plant nasturtiums next to edibles as to lure them away from the true vegetables they want to eat. After that, I figured I'd let the caterpillars nibble those all they wanted.

The flowers haven't bloomed yet but we had all seven seeds germinate. 100% success! I call that a win. Later in the summer I'll have to do an update once the flowers come out.

2. Bell Peppers

Last fall, I'd started saving seeds from bell peppers. I dried them out and then saved them in a ziplock bag in our refrigerator to keep them cool and dormant until it was planting time. This March, I pulled them out and started a little tray of them inside. I watered them for a few weeks and waited.

Nothing happened. After a few weeks of watering what looked like just a tray of dirt, I gave up on them. 

A few weeks after that, we received some green onion plants from a friend and I decided to take them home and plant them. While getting them set up in a pot, I decided to take the tray of dirt and bell pepper seeds from inside and add them to the pot. After all, if the seeds weren't germinating, I didn't want to waste the soil either. So in everything went into my pot.

Well, the green onions didn't transplant well. I'm pretty sure they're alive but they weren't growing. The roots are probably spreading underneath and forming new plants which will eventually grow, but right now they just look like an ugly mess.

However, the pepper seeds that I thought were duds were actually sprouting...rapidly....almost every single seed germinated. I didn't count but when you see an entire colony of little seed sprouts popping up, you start to get really excited and panicky.

I'll probably get criticized by a bunch of gardeners out there as to how I started my peppers from seed, but remember, I thought this was a tray of dirt with dead seeds. I was not expecting them all to grow...hence the not seeding them in their little trays correctly. 

So now I have about 50 pepper plants growing in one pot which is way too many, but they're also too delicate to transplant right now. I've been thinning them out periodically and hope to get them down to the strongest 10-20 plants. 

Thinning them out has been super counterintuitive for me because I feel bad plucking a perfectly good sprout out of the pot simply because I don't have room to grow it. However, I have to keep reminding myself that this is part of the growing process. I'd rather have 5 really great, strong plants than 50 mediocre ones. Peppers also don't play nice with each other and they want their own space and nutrients. So thinning it is. 

3. Thai Basil

I've always wanted to grow Thai basil. It seems to be a decently easy herb to grow and we use it by the handful in specific recipes. When I buy it in the store, it costs me about $3 per recipe. Friends have given me their surplus from their garden in previous years as well, but I've wanted to try growing my own. 

Sometimes you can start them from cuttings. I've never been successful with this method. I think it has something to do with my cuttings having bloomed already. This spring, I finally decided to buy some seeds and plant them. We were already planting nasturtiums and bell peppers. I figured, why not add a third plant to the mix? (Not the same logic with having a third child....) So the seeds arrived and I planted them. This time I was smart enough not to sprinkle all 100 seeds into the pot because I'd seen what had happened with my bell peppers. Instead, I carefully placed 4 holes of 2 seeds each into my pot. That way, if at least one of each group sprouted, I could easily divide 4 plants later. 

The seed packet said sprouts would emerge within 6-10 days. I saw sprouts after 5 days! They're the tiniest little bitty sprouts, but they're there! 

I spy 2 tiny sprouts.

We joke these are my plant babies. My husband has caught me outside staring at my pots of plants on multiple occasions. And my morning routine now includes bringing out a jug of water to hydrate them. Gardening is no joke, seriously. 

On a different note, we finally decided on doing our patio. We've never been this excited to spend thousands of dollars before. 😂

Insights into Induction

We've been using our induction stove for about 10 days. I've already discovered things I like and dislike about it. Do keep in mind that all of my observations and thoughts are going from a 15+ year old electric stove to a brand new induction stove. 

Things I like:

1. The entire surface is flat. The controls on our new stove are touch controls so there are no knobs. I like being able to wipe across the entire surface to clean it. Although the knobs were removable on the old ones, you were still left with little metal rods, and it was an extra piece that needed to not only be wiped under but cleaned itself.

2. It's fast. The first time we used it to make ramen for our second dinner, it took 5 minutes from start to finish boiling cold tap water and cooking the noodles. I've noticed a significant increase in cooking speed because when I'm cooking, I can tell I need to think faster in order to keep up with the cooking. Generally speaking, I already think pretty quickly, so the fact that I felt a need to think faster meant the cooking speed was actually faster than I was used to. 

Things I'm Indifferent About:

1. One of the selling points about induction that's advertised mentions the surface not heating up because it's heating up your cookware. One of the first things I did after cooking was removing the pot and putting my hand to the surface to touch it to see how hot it was. Yes, I did it with caution, not like a 5 year old child would, and yes, it was still very very warm. It wasn't hot enough to the point where I'd be getting at least a second degree burn instantly, but it was hotter than I expected. On the flip side, it is not hot enough to "cook" any spilled food. Cleanup on the stove is relatively clean and in the week and a half I've used it, I've not once needed to really scrub any burnt on food...because it's not burnt on.

2. There is noise. I've read other users describe the sound from an induction cooktop as a buzzing or subtle ringing sound, especially if the stove is turned up to the higher power levels. There is indeed a buzzing sound coming from the stove. I don't necessarily like it, but it doesn't bother me. It helps that our vent hood is on when I cook and that sound is quite loud already so the sound of the induction cooktop gets muffled rather easily. 

Things I Don't Like:

1. Because the controls are touch, you cannot set anything on the front panel where they're located regardless of whether you are using the stove or not. One morning I was making a big batch of waffles as I do once every few weeks and I had set my baking trays on the stove like I normally do so I can place waffles on them as they cook to prepare for the freezer. After about five seconds of placing down the trays, the stove started beeping at me to alert me that the buttons were being "pressed." I removed the trays and locked the controls to see if this would stop the beeping while the stove was off. Nope. Still beeped. At that point I gave up and rearranged my trays so they were not touching the control panel in the front. I will probably get used to this later as we have this stove longer, but for now, this feature makes me think too much in ways I don't really want to. 

***

Overall, I'm very happy with our upgrade. I probably won't pore over the electric bill to see if it's actually more energy efficient, but it's probably hard to actually compare because there are so many other variables that change from month to month. It makes me happy that my cooking time can be shortened, even by the slightest minutes. For now, I'm gingerly lifting pots and pans to move them around the stove top as to not scratch the pristine glass surface. In 10 years, if we're still in this house, I'll probably be sliding everything all over that cooktop.

Or maybe one year. Who knows. 😏

Birthday

There are people out in the world turning 18 today. It's a big deal for them, reaching this milestone of "adulthood" by age, anyway. It's a happy day, and it should be. Birthdays are a celebration of life, much like everyone's actual birth date. We celebrate the young birthdays in a bittersweet way, leaving behind baby days but celebrating growth milestones and learning developments. We celebrate the old birthdays with a sense of amazement and awe. And the years in-between are filled with the journey.

Something else is turning 18 today. It's not a person, it's not a tangible "thing." I can't see it. You can't see it. But I feel it. 

Happy birthday, my biggest grief in life. You've made it to 18. 

Most days, I still can't believe it. Although so many years have passed, I still feel the power of the memory of being in that hospital room. I still feel the pain of the weight of processing what was going on. I still remember thoughts going through my head. Why am I already back at school? I should be at school, it's what she wanted. I should be studying and learning and taking my tests. 

She died on a Saturday. I only missed two days of school the following week. As someone in my thirties, I look back and think, that was stupid. I should have taken the whole week off. I should have let my grades freeze instead of continuing to take my final exams that year, and even to the detriment of some of my grades at that. There's a lot of things I didn't know. You know why?

Because my grief was just born. It was a brand new baby of a feeling, and I didn't know what to do with her. So I treated her the only way I knew how - like nothing had ever happened.

But everything had happened...

Now after having kids, and even just looking at it with an adult logic, we know we can't do that. We cannot bring home a brand new baby and continue our lives like we did before. We cannot sleep through the night from 10 pm until 7 am and let the baby do his/her own thing for 9 hours. We cannot simply keep the same things on our grocery list and not think of adding additional items like diapers, wipes, baby clothes, diaper cream, formula, pacifiers, or bibs to the list. 

So this internal, emotional baby I've been raising was very abused for the first 5-7 years of her emergence. Most days she was squashed down, ignored, neglected. Some days she was allowed some attention. But it was always about what other people wanted her to do. It was about what she was supposed to do. It wasn't what she wanted. Really, it wasn't until the last 8 years when she was allowed to speak, be heard, be understood, and then given some space. 

Nobody told me it was okay to feel the way I was feeling. Nobody told me it was okay to be confused or be angry or be sad. Nobody told me it was okay to not to be okay. I wasn't actually told anything. 

Over the years I've met people who have experienced the loss of a parent, even the loss of a mother, even at a young age. But none of their griefs will ever be quite the same as mine. Nobody will ever completely understand everything I feel. And that's okay, as long as they can understand what I feel is valid and important. Sadly, there are people who cannot, and those are the people I do not need in my life. 

My grief has reached adulthood today, but this is where the metaphor ends. My grief will not grow wings and leave the nest. My grief will not become independent and live apart from me. My grief will forever stay with me and continue to age with me the rest of my life. My grief will die with me.