For my kids’ holiday piano recital, their teacher gave each of them challenging holiday songs to memorize. After several Hadley meltdowns, I told her to just focus on Silent Night instead of the assigned two and that seemed to work like a charm.
Until she actually started regressing a few days before the recital. And then the freak-outs began, followed by mind games as she started thinking she couldn’t play it at all.
Bode was another story. While Hadley had lost her confidence, he was overly confident he could knock out Jolly Old St. Nicholas and Angels We Have Heard on High. The complication: he’s totally ADHD on the piano. He is always playing (just ask driven-to-drink Jamie who just wants a moment of silence) but Bode is all over the place and rarely focuses on just one song for long. At times, he was more focused on memorizing Hadley’s song than his own which, as you can imagine, went over stupendously well with her.
So, I was nervous before the recital but then I forced myself to calm down. What was the worst that could happen? So, they screwed up. Many of our friends would be at the recital so it’s not like they were performing for strangers. I assured myself that failure and learning to pick yourself back up is a good growing experience at any age.
At the beginning of the recital, their teacher announced how proud she was of her students and how they had been assigned pieces a bit beyond their level of expertise. Finally, a ray of hope. Maybe my kids wouldn’t be alone!
And they weren’t. Though all the kids did great, there were definitely a lot of mess-ups and do-overs.
Hadley was nervous but she knocked it out of the park until the final few bars of her music, in which case she had a pretty minor flub. Most amusingly, though, was when she crossed her legs in the middle of her piece. 
Then there was Bode. The last one to perform, he could either be the grand or much less-than finale. He confidently strode over to the piano, plopped himself down and started pounding away with the intensity of Schroeder from Charlie Brown. The piano bench was pushed sideways, his brow was crinkled but gosh darn it if that boy didn’t pull his songs together in the 11th hour. Like Hadley, his flubs were relatively minor and he was all “I told you I could do it” grins when it was over.
He was in such an exuberant mood that as he was downing his refreshments after (one of each treat, of course), he jokingly called out “FOOD FIGHT!”
I’m sure the owners of the venue with their $25,000 pianos would have been thrilled.
As we were driving home, Hadley was in a much better mood. “Our teacher is the perfect piano teacher,” she raved. “She not only has us learn songs from the piano books but different ones as well. Then she has us perform them at a recital!”
We’re counting this one as a very surprising win.
I'm a Canadian-born mom of two, former Denver Post columnist, family travel writer, editor of MileHighMamas.com and 9News contributor. Expert on all things Utah, Denver, family and travel. Lover of laughter and life. Happily married to a man obsessed with growing The Great Pumpkin. 