Day of fun....

Haley is having fun with soccer. She started out yesterday not having so much fun. It was very cold and I knew the fields would be windy (winter-like weather needed...gloves, hats, coats, etc...) At first she didn't like the feel of wearing 2 socks (one over and one under her shin guards). Then she said she felt like an Oompa Loompa (from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) with all her clothing on under her soccer shirt. The first half of the game she kinda just followed after everyone and wasn't running around as fast as usual. She seemed a bit confused as to what was going on. At halftime she asked me to remove her coat and gloves which I did and she came alive, running and getting the ball. She almost scored 2 goals but the goalie stopped them...note to self to teach her to kick it where the goalie isn't. She had fun in the end and wanted to practice after violin lessons which she did for an hour until dark. She did really well for her first soccer game ever with only two practices.

Haley is progressing so quickly through her next violin book. She did the first two songs in two weeks and played them so well with such wonderful concentration yesterday that her teacher didn't have a single correction to make and showed me the bowing to the next 2 songs to work on for the next 10 days because she is away. There is such a change in Haley's hand posture and she is concentrating so well while she plays, her practices are going wonderfully and she is loving the songs. I hear her adding in dynamics and crescendos/decrescendos. It is an amazing trasformation though she played so well before. Yesterday while she was playing her teacher looked at me and mouthed, "That's really good." She was impressed.

Dylan has learned the guitar accompaniment to one of Haley's fiddle songs "The Merry Blacksmith." They have practiced it together and sound really good together. I am so impressed with them. Haley is trying out for a talent show this week and I am going to let Dylan accompany her on that song for one of her pieces. Ritch learned how to play the bodhran a bit and he was playing with them a for the song as well. If Newt will only learn to play it, we will have a little family Celtic band going on.