To save us from disaster

As you may know, a good portion of my life is spent teaching little ones how to navigate this beast of an instrument.  Which means, a good portion of my life is spent shrieking: "Look at those wrists!"  The problem with little ones is that they are little; the problem with piano benches is that they are low.  And, hence, wrists and elbows and shoulders and hands get all out of whack while those little babies are learning to play.  From week to week, we find ourselves fighting a battle of hand position disaster.

My solution has long been a cushion, to bump those little bottoms just a little higher.  The problem with the cushion, however, is that it often slides to the floor.  In fact, the problem with the cushion in actuality is that often the child will slide to the floor right along with it...

And, thus, disaster is all around us.

Hence, after all the holiday festivity was over this past weekend, I enlisted my parental units to help me save the day.

Piano bumpers became our project,

and my father and I braved the frigid outdoors in order to carve up piles and piles of wood,

to great success.

We piled those boards on top of each other, 

 gluing

and drilling with great aplomb.

Then, we dragged them inside with our frozen fingers, 

for Phase 2 of saving the day.

 We enlisted the help of my hilarious mother,

 who is "a very straight cut" (or so she's been told), and proceeded to measure and cut while we chatted away.

We provided a cushion for those little bottoms,

[discovering along the way that the talent of the straight cut is not necessarily a hereditary one],

 and wrapped those bumpers up like the sturdy packages of deliverance that they promised to be.

 We worked very hard together, solving problems left and right.

And then, by the end of the night,

I was jumping up and down with glee at the excitement of those piano babies, who have been asking me for months:

"When are you gonna make those things?!"

 They're made babies, they're made--

and from disaster we are saved!