what a day!

Today Emma is six months old! Here is what she did on her day commemorating her little life thus far...

As you all know, Emma loves music. Before she got too wiggly, she would sit on my lap while I taught some of my piano lessons and just watch the keys with fascination. Since she doesn't sit still on my lap while I teach anymore, she and I spend time together at the piano when my studnets aren't around. She absolutely loves to bang on the keys and tries to "catch" my fingers while I play.

Well. Today we were playing the piano together and all of a sudden my piano (which is a digital Yamaha Clavinova) went CRAZY! I looked down and noticed Emma had urped on the keys amidst her excitement and ferocious playing. We turned it off and on again several times, but there was still something major wrong with it. When a single note was played, you would hear several different tones, and then a random key a few registers higher or lower. It seriously sounded like my piano's "brain" went completely retarded. After a few phone calls, a professional piano salesman told us that most likely Emma's spit up got the contacts wet underneath the keys and it would probably be back to normal if we cleaned it off. He told us that we could take the keyboard apart and clean it to save ourselves from a $60-70 technician fee.

So we pondered what to do.

I was supposed to teach 7 students tonight- with the first one to arrive in an hour.

My studio recital is this Saturday, and most of my students are in a state competition next Saturday- not the best time to have a broken piano.

Those of you who know Michael- well let's just say that messing around with this kind of stuff is not his expertise. But we decided it would be worth a try. Many screws later, I called and cancelled all of my lessons.

And many more screws after that, we still couldn't get to the spot affected by Emma's spit up. About five hours later, we decided to quit taking screws out and call the technician to come do the job. It'll be a nice chunk of money to fix, but better than having to buy a new piano.

Then we (and when I say we, I mean Michael), had to figure out where to put the bazillion screws back.

Thankfully, the Temple of Music is letting me borrow a Roland for no charge until I get mine repaired- it could be a couple weeks before the technician can fix it.

When Emma got up from her nap, she seemed quite confused why the piano was in pieces on our living room floor. When we asked her what she did to it, she just got this big impish grin on her face. Oh the oblivious life of a six month old!