Update and Perfect Pitch

Did you think that I stopped blogging??? I did last week... EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US, Jonas just had a touch, WERE PUKING OR HAD THE BIG 'D', AND SOME OF US BOTH; FOR 4 DAYS!!!!!!!!!!!! YUCK!!!! Never in our almost 11 years of marriage and almost 9 years of raising kiddos, have we ALL been sick at one time! Lets just say I never want to see puke again. I will not go into details, but the worst puke was Micah last Sunday night: Top bunk, asleep in the corner, with Hannah sleeping peacefully below.... I will let you fill in the blanks. Not a pretty sight or smell... :-(

Then, we get a call Wednesday night that someone wants to see our house on Thursday afternoon. Seriously God, you have a great sense of humor. We have the best realtor on the planet and she came over Thursday morning to help me get ready for the showing. Result of the showing: Realtor loved it, but the couple thought it was a smidge small. Another showing on Saturday, and we will probably get feedback for that tomorrow. We just want to sell and move to a bigger house. Soon we are going to have 5 children under our roof and we feel that our 3 bedroom/1 bathroom house is getting small. :-)

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On another note (no pun intended), we just discovered a couple of weeks ago that Hannah possesses perfect pitch, also called absolute pitch. I was floored! She has been in Piano lessons since 1st grade and her school is a music and fine arts magnet school, but I was still not expecting this. She also plays the flute and cello.

She knows all of the keys on the piano instantly and she can transpose other instruments to the piano. For example: Her band teacher played his trumpet that is written in 'C', but that same note on the piano is a B flat; and Hannah can transpose his trumpet notes to the correct notes on the piano. WOW.........Julliard, here we come!!!

Here is an interesting article about blind musicians and absolute pitch:

Perfect pitch common among the blind
Science News, Nov 25, 2000 by J.T.
12Next
Stevie Wonder. Ray Charles. Jose Feliciano. Because of such legends, there's a perception that blind people make great musicians. Scientists do have some evidence from blind people that brain areas normally devoted to vision become involved in hearing or in controlling the dexterity needed to play an instrument. A new study now finds that blind musicians are more likely to have perfect pitch than sighted people are. Perfect pitch is the ability to identify the pitch, or frequency, of a musical note without a reference note. This talent, perhaps as rare as 1 in 2,000 among the general population, seems to result from a blend of genetics and experience. People with early musical training are much more likely than others to have perfect pitch, but the skill also runs in families (SN: 11/16/96, p. 316).

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Roy H. Hamilton of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and his colleagues surveyed 30 people who have been blind since the age of 6 or earlier. Within that group, 21 reported having a musical background and 12 of them--57 percent of the musicians--said they have perfect pitch. People who claim to have perfect pitch are invariably correct, says Hamilton, and when the researchers tested 7 of the 12, they confirmed the skill in each.

The prevalence of perfect pitch among the blind musicians is about two to three times that usually reported for sighted musicians, says Hamilton. Now, in an effort to pinpoint brain regions responsible for perfect pitch, the investigators are conducting brain-imaging studies of blind musicians. A previous imaging study in sighted people revealed a brain region that's larger in those with perfect pitch than in others.

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