February Happenings

February has just flown by and I'm starting to see the light at the end of the winter! Here are a few things we were up to.

Molly's developing her sewing skills.  She made this skirt all by herself.

Molly was awarded Student of the Month!

Molly continued her craftiness by finishing up a scarf that she knit all by herself.

 

Justin took me out for a date for my birthday and this was one surprise I came home to from the kids.

This was the other surprise from the kids.  My girls are the best!

And these beautiful roses were from Justin along with new music composition software. I had a great birthday with dinner out and Justin even let me beat him at bowling. ;)

Sarabande by Bernard Andres

It's been a long time since I posted a harp solo.  I've been kept busy with a lot of other music, mostly for ensembles lately, so I thought I'd share a new video today.  This song is called Sarabande by Bernard Andres--a very well-known harp composer. 

I first started learning this song in May 2015 after only a year of harp lessons, and I thought my harp teacher was crazy for giving me this piece, thinking it was WAY beyond my abilities.  She often plays this song at weddings and thought it would be good for me to learn. It has lots of big chords one after another and running eighth-note passages, as well as note combinations requiring fingerings that I've never done before and worked a long time to develop the proper coordination to be able to play.  I literally have been working on this song for 10 months and while it's not perfect and I still don't have it quite up to the intended tempo, we've decided to put it to the side for now and move on to some new music.  I have almost all of it memorized, so I thought I'd record it while it was fresh in my brain and on my fingers.  And maybe someday I'll come back to it to really get it polished.

Annie's Sleep Study

Annie had a sleep study last week.  She's had several over the course of her life, but she had this one to try to figure out why she wasn't tolerating her CPAP very well anymore.  Several months ago we got her fitted for a new mask, but it didn't seem to help at all.  Annie was a champ getting all set up for the study, but the night was horrible.  They tried various CPAP pressures as well as various BiPAP pressures.  She didn't like any of them, and still had a fair amount of apnea on both systems.

Since high pressures from CPAP and BiPAP can cause central apnea (apnea from no obstructions, but from messages being sent to the brain to stop breathing), our pulmonologist suggested we do an at-home oxygenation study to see what Annie's O2 levels are doing in the night while just on room air and no breathing assistance.  If her O2 sats don't dip below 90% too often, or stay there too long, they may discontinue night-time breathing assistance, otherwise, they will transfer her to BiPAP which seemed to produce the least number of apnea episodes.  It was a rough night of listening to the pulse ox machine beep every time she dipped below 90%, but by the time Justin could get in there to turn off the alarm, she had already recovered on her own up to 100%! We don't have all the data back yet, but we're hoping that since her O2 levels were recovering so quickly with each apnea episode that we can discontinue breathing assistance at night.  Annie tends to get higher quality sleep without it lately, so fingers crossed!