What a girl wants

Kira turned thirteen last week and I vowed a week of posts about her, but as you can see that hasn't happened. Not that it would matter to her, since she would be perfectly happy if I never mentioned her on my blog, ever. Apparently there are some people who just don't like having every little detail of their life splattered across the internet for strangers to see. Strange, I know. I would say she's no daughter of mine, but if you saw her tear through a sale rack at Macy's you'd know otherwise.

A few weeks ago Rigel bought Kira an early birthday present. She already knew what it was, but that didn't dampen her excitement as she started to unwrap it. She did it slowly and deliberately, and when she finally had the prize in her hand she looked like a kid who just found out school had been cancelled forever.

"OMIGOD, isn't it beautiful?" She cooed over it for a few minutes before she let any of us touch it. You would have thought there was something priceless in her palm, like the Hope Diamond or the world's last piece of bacon.

A tiara? A shiny new iPod? A bar of solid gold? No, what she was hyperventilating over was her brand new capo, a device that clamps onto her guitar and allows her to change its key. I had no idea what it was, and when I first saw it I thought Rigel had made a horrible mistake and had just given our thirteen-year-old daughter some sort of gynecological instrument.

While she's still determined to go to art school, one of the things that has become very evident is that Kira has a natural gift for music. Where I took seven years of piano lessons and came out of it barely being able to play a chord, Kira spent only a couple of summers taking guitar and has already taught herself how to play a lot of her favorite songs just by using the 'tabs' she finds online. My musical future ended when I played an off-key, mistake-laden version of the theme from 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' that nearly caused my teacher to come at me with a crowbar, and here's Kira plucking away to her beloved Ting Ting's tunes, strumming a few pieces from the "Juno" soundtrack and jamming along to a song from some band called The Kills. So it's safe to say that all of her musical genes have definitely come from Rigel, although the way she curses under her breath and kicks the table when she gets a note wrong? That's totally me.

She's been wanting to learn how to play the piano as well, so our 'big' gift to her for her birthday was a Yamaha keyboard. She doesn't start her lessons until next week, but she's already managed to teach herself the theme from her favorite show, Fringe. I have to say it's so exciting to see her so inspired about something, and I'm hoping she remains this passionate about music as she grows up. This whole thing is a bonus for Rigel as well, since picking out Kira's gifts at Guitar Center is definitely preferable to having to shop for leg warmers at Claires.

And while she's forbidden me to videotape any of her recent performances, I still have this video of her playing guitar to Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams when she was 10. (I can sell it to MTV one day when they ask me for early footage of Kira once she becomes an international recording sensation. I guess I better hang on to that capo - it could pay for my new kitchen someday.)



. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

tags: teens | teenagers

Tweet Pin It