We just got our "new" piano delivered and I am so excited about it! Jared's parents had a friend from their ward wanting to get rid of their piano. They were willing to part with it for free to anyone who could come pick it up. We only just got our thrift store piano a little over a year ago so I didn't think we were looking for a piano, but holy cow turns out we were. It is SUCH an upgrade. I'm not sure how old it is, but it's a nicer brand (Kawai), looks great, doesn't need to be tuned yet, and most importantly, she plays like an absolute dream. Since it was free, and since our last piano-moving situation was a huge headache, we decided to shell out for professional piano movers. DO THIS if you are moving a piano and you can. It cost a little over $300 but honestly I think we came out ahead. By the time we would have rented a truck, paid for the gas and the mileage (the piano was over an hour from our house), coordinated helpers for down there and up here, likely banged it around getting it off a truck, thereby requiring us to pay for a tuning . . . and I mean the headache saved alone was worth the cost to us. Especially knowing this is likely our "forever piano." Here she is:
We were thinking of asking the piano movers to move our old piano out after bringing the new one in. We didn't end up doing that (we'll try and sell it or give it to someone in our ward), but knowing it was a possibility I wanted to record myself playing on my first piano one last time. And now that I've figured out how to post video to my blog y'all will not be spared. This piano saved me during the first half of my pregnancy with Alice. I was very nauseous every minute of the day those first 25 weeks, and the only thing that could slightly take my mind off the nausea was practicing this song ("Tarantella" by Albert Pieczonka) on my little way-out-of-tune thrift store piano. I stopped taking piano lessons when I was maybe 11? This is one of the last pieces I remember learning. Fun to pick up where I left off 20 years ago. I'll always be grateful for the time spent with my $50 1970s Baldwin Acrosonic, with the little green tapes on the keys from last Christmas when I taught Jack how to play "Jingle Bells."
Here is the recording I'm choosing to post. I recorded myself 3 times. The first recording was a much better performance and much less rushed. But this one makes me laugh because it is real life with Jack rushing me and Savvy all up in everyone's business, so this is the one I'm posting. Maybe in a future week I'll upload another video playing on the new piano.
And here are some snapshots from our week:
^^Collecting stumps from the forest for our Tuesday afternoon date. Dozens of cut-up hunks of tree have been chilling off the pathway of my forest walk since a huge storm knocked a couple of trees across the path last year. Someone chopped them up and pushed them off into the forest. We decided to grab a few to put in our backyard for Jack to play on and jump from stump to stump. Yay nature playground. They've already been played on a bunch.
^^Jack's response to, "hop in the car for grocery pickup" lol
^^Sticker book fun
^^We got Alice this walker and it was a full-circle moment watching Jack pull her around the house in it. I used to pull Jack around in his walker when he was a baby for HOURS. Feeling grateful I have a bigger Jack to do the good work instead of me this time. He and Alice both get a kick out of it. We call it her "Alisade" (since our new car is a Palisade) and he loves to take her through "car washes" and such. Geez two kids is fun. I feel much more in my element with two kids than I did with one.
And that's a wrap! It been a fun, exhausting week. Alice is still usually waking "only" twice a night, but the way she's spacing those wakes up now has me getting no more than a 3-hour chunk of sleep at a time. Brutal. Tried to do some sleep training last night to get her to push her first feed back and it did NOT go well. I think she was genuinely hungry so I eventually gave in and won't be trying that again anytime soon. Since I started allergy meds and since I've lost a bunch of weight cutting out soy and dairy (by the way plz no congrats on "losing the weight"--I'm actually very sad about the whole thing and miss my post-baby body I really came to love; maybe I'll get brave and talk about body image in a future post when my milk comes back and I'm past the crying-about-it stage), my milk supply has dropped quite a bit and I think Alice is not getting as much at night as she used to. This week my to-do list is to try and get my supply back up by drinking way more water, increasing calories, resting and taking it easy, avoiding all antihistamines (might be a rough allergy season ahead of me), and feeding/pumping a little extra each day this week. I have no freezer stash left so I'd love to get back to a point where I'm making a little bit of excess that I can store so I have the option of, say, sending Jared down to spend the day at his parents' with the kids while I spend a Saturday cleaning and organizing the house. Planned to do that on Saturday this last week but then realized I didn't have any milk stored and the only formula in our house was dairy based. Darn. Maybe next weekend!
