Guitar Hero - Pt 3/The Roadie

In addition to Linus' toy guitar, we have a couple others around the house. I've got a real guitar upstairs on the third floor. This winter we often went up to the third floor, which is mostly open space, so that Linus and Fidget could get some exercise running around without having to worry about hurting themselves or anything else. We've put most of our real instruments up there, so the keyboard, my guitar and the kids percussion instrument toy set are all upstairs. I will usually play the guitar while Fidget and Linus burn off a few calories chasing each other around the room.

Linus has certain preferences for my guitar playing - ideally, it is something with a steady rhythm and chords, as opposed to finger-picking or individual notes. Favorites include a couple Grateful Dead songs, "Not Fade Away" and "Good Lovin'". He'll let me know if I've made a bad choice by walking over, putting his hand over the strings and telling me, "Not that song, Dad" until I revert to one of the aforementioned favorites. In contrast, Fidget doesn't really care what I play as long as she can run around in circles.

Both Fidget and Linus will occasionally take turns strumming the strings while I play chords so that they don't get too frustrated.

Linus is also proving to have a backup career as a roadie if the whole guitar-playing thing doesn't work out. When we head up to the third floor, Linus likes to make sure that the guitar is hooked up properly and usually beats me to plugging in the two cords into an effects pedal. It took him a couple tries the first time that he insisted on being the one to connect everything, but he now consistently gets the cords in the right order in the jacks, so I've got a roadie helping set up now when we go upstairs. He's also figuring out what the different switches and dials on the guitar and amp do so that he can adjust those to his liking.