Lukas was watching Marie practice the violin and said he wants to take violin lessons, so I gave him the same answer I gave Marie four or five years ago: you have to learn the piano first. (Lots of reasons, but that's not the topic right now--maybe I'll write about why another time!) So Lukas asked for a piano lesson, and very, very happily, the place we're staying has a piano. Our piano books are all in the shipment, which won't arrive for another few weeks, but his interest is NOW, and in any case, we should take advantage of having access to a piano for the next couple of weeks, since we're unlikely to have a piano once we've found a place to rent...

So I started out by asking Lukas to describe the piano, which he did: "Well, it has keys that make the hammers inside hit those big strings to make a sound, and brakes (peddles...), and shiny wood, and a thing to put up to put the notes on, and designs, and a bench, and our piano at home had a lot of dust on it." (Our piano back in Germany probably doesn't have any dust on it anymore, as we sold it to a German-German family...) I rather liked his description. :-)

We went on to talk about black keys and white keys and patterns and up and down and the musical alphabet and he found all the C's and learned middle-C position, and we're finished for today.