Pixel Darkroom Photography

As a part of homeschooling our kids we also chose a foreign language. The kids are already more or less bilingual because they speak fluently both English and Romanian. Having studied in Germany myself, we decided to teach them German. This is bedtime German time, which started to happen more often and we are reading/counting here the cockatoos in a tree. Cockatoo is a type of parrot that has a very funny sounding German name. Look it up.

This is Piano Time Before Bedtime. It doesn’t happen very often although it should. One of my fondest memories of my childhood was when my Dad would play piano for us. We played so much one time, that he forgot entirely that he put water on the stove to boil and make tee. He put the leaves in the boiling water and left them there until we realized later that we had completely forgot about his tee. Once the funny smell came from the kitchen, from his tee, we all ran into the kitchen to find the kettle all dried up with flickering ashes inside. We remember to this day that Dad made “tee with sparks”.

When he played piano for us he would improvise most of the time, and I could not understand for the life of me how he did it. He would just say, “just put your hand on the piano and let it walk, then adjust the left hand to fit with the right hand”. Now I’m doing it for my kids, except for the tee sparks. It’s amazing to see life from two perspectives. It happens to me so often that I see life from my perspective as a kid, through memories, and my perspective as an adult through my ongoing experience as a father. I can only hope and believe this happens to most people. I pray not to make the same mistakes my parents made, and in the same time I pray and hope that my children will not make the same mistakes that I make with them. When I think of life like this, I only realize more and more that humans fall short and fail many times and it is only God’s grace that helps us get up from our misery and from the consequences of our mistakes and try to keep walking.