Mom Remembers

We are all painting at the dining room table (big mistake, I know).  Carl picks up Sven's (mostly) dried artwork and exclaims: CARL:  Oh, wow!  Did Sven do this? ME: Mm-hm. CARL:  It looks real!  Was it fingerpaint? ME: Mm-hm. CARL:  It looks like a real tornado, sideways, on the grass.  I never knew that he could paint that good!  It looks awesome!

Having a quirky, genius kid is often delightful. I have been teaching Soren a little bit of music theory.  Actually, he has been teaching himself by reading the text in all the piano lesson books.  But I'll pretend that I've been scaffolding it some. This week he has been working on identifying triads, a task I never dreamed I would teach my 2nd grader.  And then he figured out something additional that astonished and delighted me. He is learning a song called "Cockles and Mussels" and I assigned him to say each chord name of the accompaniment while he practiced.  We went over it in his lesson; at that time he found all the obvious triads as well as the ones that were inverted or split between hands.  That was cool but didn't surprise me. What did  surprise me happened today, during his practice time. He called to me from where I was stirring monkey mac in the kitchen.  "Mom!  I found a chord you didn't see!"  I put down my spoon an...