Wednesday, December 23, 2009

O Holy Night

In the second video of the Christmas program series, Anna plays O Holy Night. I'm so proud of her determination with this piece. When she started with our new piano teacher last February, she could only play simple songs, one hand at a time. I don't play the piano, so I'm probably not the best judge, but I think she has progressed pretty quickly since then. It has been hard for her to find the time to practice this fall because of her swim schedule and a challenging year at school, and twice she even asked if she could quit. We were both a little worried when she still couldn't get through the second and third page the last week in November, but she stuck with it (thanks to some encouraging words from her instructor). She played it through 3-5 times a day until the performance and she got it! Because she worked so hard this month, she didn't seem to be too upset that she did end up having a problem on the last page in the performance. She knew that she had played it better a number of times, and chalked it up to nerves. Even so, it sounded lovely and I will never grow tired of hearing her play this song. I think it was a great learning experience for her. And now she seems more eager than ever about the piano. Today she was trying out several new songs, so it will be fun to see what the next year holds.

But as much as I love watching her play, I just can't get over how grown up she's looking. {sigh} I wish I could push the pause button on life like I can with the video. {double sigh}

Oh, and I'm sorry if you weren't able to watch the first video, but it should be fixed now. Thank you, Casey, for letting me know about the problem. I get a little freaked out about putting the kids on YouTube, so I thought making the videos private would help. But I didn't realize that meant they wouldn't work on the blog. I don't know why YouTube should bother me, since I have no problem posting all about our lives here. I think part of it is that people on YouTube leave horrible comments all time. Several times I've had to put a piece of paper over the comments while showing a video to my kids, because they were full of profanity and rudeness. So for these videos I just disabled the comments in YouTube. Okay, I'm getting way off topic now. I better go wrap some gifts. : )

2 comments:

  1. Anna did a wonderful job. Tell her your blog friend is proud of her for not quitting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. How beautiful she plays. What an accomplishment.

    ReplyDelete