running home

...is the title of Sky's most recent album, released in 2007.
This is the photo on the cover of the CD.
It was taken by our friend Teresa.

Happy Skylar with harmonica and guitar, age nine.

Sky with guitar in our back yard.

Sky at the piano.

With the desire to go back east foremost in my mind, I will now introduce you to an interesting aspect of our children -- musical talent. This blog post title, "Running Home" is appropriate. You will see why if you keep reading.

I will start with Skylar, as she is the oldest. She started showing interest in piano when she was four. She would pick around and even wrote a little diddy with silly words. We always had the children listening to music. I chose the more common kids music, which they loved. This drove Gary a bit nuts, so he also had me play Ray Charles, the Sundays, the Beatles, or anything we liked. We actually played records on his old turntable. A few years later, at about age seven, Sky asked Gary how to play a song. She wanted to learn Blackbird, by Paul McCartney. Gary told her it was a pretty complicated song, but he sat her down to show her. She learned it very quickly, astonishing Gary. She then began to learn Beatles songs at a rapid rate, often two a day, until she knew almost all of them. Eventually she learned almost all of Gary's songs.

She also began to write her own songs on piano and guitar. When she played them for us we would cry, they were so touching. She recorded her first album a few years ago, at age nine, and titled it Skywriting. She loved every aspect of the recording process and finished the five songs in almost no time at all, mostly needing one take only. She and I had fun designing the cover and pages inside. Sky continued to write songs and this past year she recorded another album, with more songs than the first. She and I designed this one almost totally on our own. Sky took most of the photos used, with my camera. The CD is for sale in a bookstore in California, and the proceeds go to charity. Here is the link. You have to go to web page's "shop", and then to the music section, and find the CD by title. http://www.ammachi.org/

She is now eleven, almost twelve. She has continued to write, and the next album Gary told her she could have drums on. He told her to write twenty songs, and pick the best ten. She is on a roll! She has written four songs in the last two days. I think she has ten already. To be continued...