I pride myself with being a somewhat “lax” mom especially from a stereotypical “Asian” Mom perspective . Oh I’ve been nagging my teen daughter to no end to finish up her final course of last academic year by the deadline ( as a typical teenager why shouldn’t she wait until closer to the deadline?). But I don’t get on her back too much about time on the internet or playing games with her friends. How can I realistically do that, when all of her schooling is online, and there are limited options when we are now in sub zero temperatures with no where to go? Covid times. I know she watches videos and has Tik Tok, plays VR games, sees what other kids do with their hair shops online for cutesy things…I trust that she is staying safe and she scoffs at how naive I am to think that she lacks such sophistication in this area…

There seem to be fringe benefits though. At one point she stumbled upon something that she knows she can do.

The electric guitar. Wow. I didn’t see that one coming! I hid my inner excitement -I think it’s pretty cool …

… sure she did this before when “out of the blue” she wanted to try violin lessons. That sort of went nowhere fast. But at least it was something new, she did a few lessons but felt it wasn’t for her. We had a big talk and life lesson about sticking things out. But still it went nowhere.

Guess what? This guitar thing became THE perfect bargaining chip-the proverbial “dangling carrot”. You finish your course, we order the guitar (never mind that the hubs has been thinking about getting one for a while…) I have no shame when it comes to bribery. How often does a 16 yo get excited ? Well at least this once!

Exam was written this weekend, paper submitted and the instrument is now on order . As are more earplugs, just in case ( at least it’s not a drum kit)

First on the repertoire will be the Arctic Monkeys..

Stay tuned …