VIP...

Or VIB. This little bear is working very hard on his very important task this week. She's not going anywhere without Ted at the moment.

It's been a roller-coaster of a day - and not the "wohoo this is so awesome" kind of ride.

On the whole, school seems to be good. She loves her drama teacher especially. She is stressed with maths. She is stressed with the fact she's expected to do their full academic testing next week, less than a week in to it. The others all have revision books and have had a whole holiday preparing. She's not even had a single science lesson because of how her music timetable has fallen this week. She's still got to do the test.... I haven't heard a single word from her main form teacher. Who's also the maths teacher.

Music stuff is good. She loves her bassoon teacher. She had time meeting the other bassoonists after school today and got to play quartets with them.

Boarding is hard. She hasn't clicked with her roommates yet. They hate her nightlight. She hates being made to stay in bed til 6.30 am and feels rushed for getting ready. She doesn't like that she cant go to bed when she is tired, she has to wait. Especially if the choristers aren't ready and she has to go after them for showers. She doesn't like the music played in the house and hasn't quite reached asking for her choice for a while.

And they've had a noise complaint from the neighbours about her morning practice - which takes place in line with school policy and as arranged with her house parent. But this has meant she's been kicked out of the music room for morning practice and has to go into a room she doesn't like so much.

But she's happy to be at the school. Boarding is a huge adjustment that isn't coming naturally to her. I'm pretty exhausted, it's taking up almost all of my capacity. There are stupid things like ongoing issues for her accessing email and Google accounts which I picked up today were the result of someone putting her email address on the database wrong.

But. Her bassoon teacher thinks she's wonderful and she's had "lots of smiling and lots of thoughtful" in her lessons, so he said. They've spent the first two lessons working on her piece for a masterclass day tomorrow. She's going to hopefully really enjoy having that. Another hardly doing any academics day.

I reminded her today that it's ok for something brilliant to still be really hard. She seemed to appreciate that. And it pretty much says it all. Brilliant but hard.