I’ll spare you the excuses about why I haven’t posted in months. (Gulp.) There are plenty of you out there who work full time and parent full time, too — and still manage to commit regular blocks of time to blogging. I admire you, and I wish I had your dedication. Somehow, my dedication gets spread around too thinly to other things. Ah well.

For the past several months, I’ve been working on a project with my 15 year old son, Alex, who is a gifted pianist.

His newest CD, Christmas Keyz, is now available for purchase on Amazon.

As you can imagine, there is much to tell about this. I tend to get wrapped up in the details of how long he’s been playing (11 years), the contests he’s entered and won (another post someday), and the remarkable paths he has ventured down that have each contributed to his musicianship, performance abilities, and altruistic maturity.

But what really matters is that he’s accomplished something unique, something beautiful, and something that brings joy to other people.  He stands a little taller these days, and that’s a sight that makes any mother’s heart nearly brim over.

This holiday season, Alex will take his music to a number of community events, including the local library’s “Visit with Santa” and a local elementary school’s “Santa Shop.” But his favorite audiences are the ones he’s been playing for since last June — the residents of a few retirement centers. He most enjoys playing for “the regulars” who gather to hear him play, who grasp his hands and look him deep in the eye as they thank him for bringing his music again, who cajole and tease him and press candies into his palm with a sidelong glance at mom.

You can check out clips of his music on his website at The Music is Key. (His site, BTW, was designed by fellow TMG Blogger, Rachael Cahours Acklin. LOVE her work.) You can watch him play his original arrangement, “Noel the First” from that site or on YouTube and Facebook. His MySpace page has a complete MP3 file of another of his original arrangements, “Away in a Manger”.

Alex is currently in discussions with a number of charities. We hope to have a special promotion sealed in the first week of December. For now, he’s watching sales closely, hoping that they edge up to the point where he can recover production costs on the CDs, website design, and marketing. He hopes to make enough to be able to fund his next two projects, a CD of his original compositions and a CD of his favorite anime themes (hauntingly beautiful works from various scenes in lesser-known video games).

I couldn’t be more proud of him. I hope you’ll stop by his website and read a little more about him. I hope you’ll consider purchasing a CD or two — as a proponent of the arts, as a supporter of young enterpreneurship, and/or as a voice of approval to a teenage volunteer musician giving back to the greater community. Thanks — and Merry Christmas.

Back in July, I posed a question here about extracurricular activities and how much is too much? My girl was getting ready to start kindergarten and I was stressing over whether to sign her up for ballet or gymnastics or both.

In the end, I pushed aside my own deep desire to raise a prima ballerina and asked her what she wanted to do. That turned out to be gymnastics.

Then, her daddy jumped into the fray pushing piano lessons. I’d initially decided to go with the recommendation to limit it to just one after-school activity at her age, but I really have hoped she would inherit her father’s musical talent and he found someone right in the neighborhood who taught out of her home. Thirty minutes a week didn’t seem like that much more, so I went with it.

My question this time is, how long is long enough to tell you child they must try an activity before quitting?

After the first gymnastics lesson where she appeared to be enjoying herself, my girl had a complete melt down in the car on the way home. Gymnastics was too hard! She didn’t want to go again! Well, my pragmatic side immediately said she had to at least finish out the month because we’d already paid for it. But, another side of me wanted her to learn that not everything will come to her as easy as her academics seem to be doing, and that she would have to work at some things in life. So, I held the line and two lessons later she was loving gymnastics.

Six weeks into piano lessons the same turnaround has not happened. Her complaints are very similar – it’s too hard, but also “boring.” Her teacher says she is doing very well and is even ahead of another student the same age who started at the same time. But getting her to practice is like pulling teeth! Actually, it’s harder because her first tooth fell out last weekend with ease, but it was painful for both of us to simply complete two pages in her theory workbook last night. She’s asking to quit. Dad’s not ready for it. I suggested maybe trying just through the end of the year, but neither of them seemed to like that idea.

Do a Google blog search on “quit AND piano” and there is certainly no shortage of discussions on this topic. There are the students who are contemplating it, the teachers who are agonizing over it and reminiscers who are regretting it years later. I myself fall into the latter category – sorta. I do wish I could play, but don’t really have fond memories of the three years I took without ever really learning to read music (I was really good at just memorizing what the teacher showed me and faking my way through).

So are some people just naturals at music and others not? Is six weeks long enough to find out? What are your experiences around this topic?

Laura P. Thomas is the wife of a former rocker and mother of one 6-year-old girl that’s already waaay too interested in The Jonas Brothers. (the apple didn’t fall far) She works in the Global Online team at Dell, evangelizes virtual worlds, and twitters too much as LPT.