music to my ears

i was going to post these photos tomorrow as "wordless wednesday" but as i was preparing to load them, i kept reminiscing about so many other stories and memories that i decided to go ahead with a full-blown (very wordy) post. 

but rather than make this the post of a hundred hyperlinks, i'm going to pull from some of my old favorites and re-post them here.  no, you're probably not that interested in all these jack-isms, but we're in love with them. 

so here goes nothing...

i realized this afternoon that the two lewis guys had gone missing, so i crept upstairs to find this:

can't figure out what's going on?  josh has googled "drum sets" and he and jack are pouring through picture after picture in the search results -- all the while exchanging man talk about kick drums, snares, and high hats. 

jack. was. in. awe.

jack's love of all things musical didn't just start today.  in fact, when he was born, i was laying on the bed racking my brain trying to figure out what the strumming sound was that i kept hearing.  i finally asked my OB what in this world that noise was...

turns out jack left my womb with a guitar in hand.

now he hasn't always had a pink guitar.  for a while, in fact, he didn't have a guitar at all -- but he made do.

(from april 2009 -- this was obviously before i gave up capital letters)
We're a big musical family around here. It's not that any of us is that incredibly gifted with any amazing musical talent (although Josh would give his broken leg to be able to tear it up on the drums), but we all love music. At any given moment, walk into our house or take a ride with us in the car and you're almost guaranteed to hear a tune. And if you're the really lucky guy sitting beside us at a red light, you might even find one of us playing a pretend instrument or two!

Apparently the air-guitar is a little too abstract for Jack, so he likes to bring it down to a more concrete level. He'll take any old household item, hold it like a guitar, and strum away to the beat. And trust me, he's got quite the imagination!

I thought this was a kid-sized mop (yep, I start 'em early around here), but to Jack, it's an electric guitar:

 
You know those little eye covers for your stovetop? They're no match for Jack's musical skills!


I haven't decided if this one is extra sweet or slightly blasphemous (at least it was a Christian song he was rocking out to)! Yes, that's Josh's Bible...


And finally, talk about making lemonade when you're dealt a big handful of lemons (very expensive, painful, and exhausting lemons)...


jack had a lot of time to fall even more in love with music through our involvement with the music ministry at church.  here's an excerpt from a post i did in july 2009.  it's actually more about izzy than anything, but it's still a piece of jack's musical history.  ;-)

I think I've mentioned our rotating church schedule of Josh runs sound/I take care of the little ones and then I play keys/Josh takes a turn with the kids. Well every once in a while, the schedule gets a bit jumbled, and we end up both responsible for our separate duties on the same day. That was the case a couple of Sundays ago. But it doesn't just affect Sunday mornings...it also determines the plan on the prior Tuesday, because that's when the worship band has practice.

On this particular Tuesday, we loaded everybody up in the car and headed to the church so that Josh could twirl the buttons and knobs on the soundboard (I'm sure there's a much more technical way to explain what he does, but that's definitely not my department) and I could practice with the band for the following Sunday morning service. For the first hour-and-a-half, the kids were fantastic! They entertained themselves by running around the empty sanctuary and playing their various and sundry air-instruments. But by the time it hit their usual nighty-night time, they were showing signs of fading. Quickly.


The funniest part of that picture (thanks to my camera phone) is that Jack is playing around with the cords (ok, that part's not so funny), and Abby's just about passed out because she's so ready to hit the hay. And they're laying on a couple of chairs that Josh turned over and laid on the stairs to try to keep Isabel off the stage.

Izzy, on the other hand, wasn't quite so content to wait patiently for practice to wrap up. She kept trying to get to me to be cuddled (hence the chair arrangement), but I obviously couldn't hold her when I was playing the keyboard...and Josh couldn't do much with her because he was busy working on the worship schedule for the service. Soooo...I put my thinking cap on and came up with this:

 
I dashed out to the car, grabbed the Ergo baby carrier, tossed her in, and played away. It worked beautifully!! I was able to run the whole set, and she was able to get the snuggles she so desperately needed in her sleepy state. Here was the view from my vantage point:

my being in the band at church afforded jack many more opportunities than just watching us play.  he got to be IN the band during practice some, too.  but first he had to have his own guitar.

(from december 2009)
 
to say that he likes his little guitar would be like saying i kind of dig photography. he has played it almost* constantly today. all. day. long.

*the few breaks he took were to play the DRUM he got last night from my parents.

 
but his head almost exploded with excitement when josh got his guitar out, too. nothing beats hanging out with daddy on the couch and playing some tunes on the guitars...

 
izzy's head almost exploded with excitement, too, when she pulled these out of her stocking. she loves them. really.
once jack had the goods, he was rearing to go.  

we all know how much jack loves to play guitar and how jazzed he was to get a "real" guitar for christmas, right? well, we thought it would be fun to let jack take his guitar to church this morning and play it while i was practicing with the band. first of all, he played it the whole way there...

...then when we got there, not only did they let him play it, they told him he could come up on stage to practice with us! he squealed like a girl and ran up to stand by his bestest buddy, mr. steve.

he took really careful notes on how all the guys played...

...and by the end of practice, he knew how to hold the pick in his mouth and how to put the guitar in a stand when he wasn't playing it. he even kicked his leg out so he could prop his guitar up while he was jamming (actually, he's been doing that for a while...i've just never gotten a good picture of it).


our friend steve plays way more than just the bass guitar, and he was happy to show jack the ropes on the drum set (he really wanted to school him in the trombone, but there wasn't one handy).

of course, i'd love for him to take up another instrument as well...

(from september 2009)
Did you know that Jack's even learning how to play the piano?

 
If he ever makes it big, we'll just have to sit him down to discuss the importance of pants. 

and now for one of my all-time favorites.  this is going to look very different one day, but i think i'll always remember jack and his guitar this way.