They're not normal...

I think I first realised this when ODD's chorus mistress announced her toilet flushed in F Major. Seriously? Who thinks like that?

In point of fact, according to Google, most toilets flush in Eb, though anything in D is also a strong contender. I have no idea.  My ear is nowhere good enough for that even if I could be bothered. There are, however, whole forums dedicated to discussing this esoteric fact.

What it did highlight for me is that musicians hear the world differently to the rest of us. I hear noise.  They hear keys & scales.

Perhaps I should have twigged earlier, only I didn't because we weren't doing music & the rest of my bombastic lot made noise, not music, by anyone's standard. I didn't know any musicians, not real musicians, only people who learnt music & that is not necessarily the same thing.

That changed with ODD. When she was quite little, but had started schooling with me, she would occasionally, spend a morning in the local grade 1 classroom while I taught the big kids in grades 5,6 & 7 how to read. I would collect her @ break & we would go home together. She never wanted to stay for the afternoon session, even though, for the first few times we did this, she thought it was super exciting & very grown up & it was all so novel she was on her best behaviour & the teacher adored her, she was so well behaved.  I wasn't sure, @ first, we were discussing the same child...

Then it happened.  I went to pick up my child & found her sitting all alone, pale & wan, totally ignored by staff & pupils alike.  She hadn't touched her snack.  She didn't want to play. I thought she was unwell.

Now my ODD is a talker.  She can talk the moon down from the sky & she has been like that from about 5 months, when she first began talking, & not only did she talk all day, she talked all night as well because she talked in her sleep. She was, perhaps, my noisiest child.  It is so deceptive.  I had completely absorbed my mother's maxim that given her drathers she would have opted for quiet, musical children. Oh, dear. If only she'd realised.  Her one really musical child was also her super noisy one!

So I took my very quiet child home & she put herself to bed & slept for hours. Even when she got up she was still quiet & pale.  Eventually I asked about her morning.

Oh, mummy! They were noisy & naughty!

I have since learnt that many musicians have very sensitive hearing that is easily damaged by excessive noise & that a rowdy classroom had literally made my child sick.  Even before I knew anything, before we began the years & years of music that were to become my life as well as my child's, the Lord was ensuring her hearing was protected.  Years of your Average Australian Public school classroom would have damaged her hearing.  Our house was normally very quiet because I don't do well in chaos & mayhem.  And we pottered through our days doing the sort of things that us arty~farty types like: art, craft, drama, music ~ lots & lots of music because, as homeschoolers, we had time to practise more than one thing & I learnt that musicians know which key their toilet flushes in.  I'm sure that's not normal.