Does Tu Plus Tu Equal Trouble?

Music coaxes them off the couch, smiles pulled from furrowed brows.

“Dance!” Dylan exclaims, making Abbey laugh with his now infamous “squat move”, deep knee bends with an ear-to-ear grin on his face.

Abbey’s movements are more erratic, soft and fluid one moment, frantic and silly the next.

“That’s a pirouette, Mommy,” she informs me, spinning on one leg, unbalanced and giggling, her pronunciation slightly more impressive than her technique.

Our dance parties spontaneously add life to our days, rainy mornings when we’re stuck in pajamas for too long, afternoons when Dylan’s nap crowds into the slight space between rest and the craziness of dinnertime.

We dance with abandon, spinning and shimmying and falling in laughter.

“I learned that at dance, Mommy,” Abbey confides every once in a while, and my heart sighs in happiness that she enjoys her classes, that she looks forward to them, that she walks into the dance studio comfortably and with only a slight hint of shyness.

Later, I settle down to watch a train wreck of a reality show I should be ashamed to admit watching. 

Dance Moms might be the first reality show that has actually induced nausea as I watched, and I watched the entire first season of Jersey Shore. 

Something about the combination of the overbearing dance teacher, the competitive moms, the little girls in full make-up and earrings at their dance classes, not competitions or performances,brings tears to my eyes.

And while I realize this show is an exaggerated version of some crazy reality designed to invoke strong reactions, a sliver of doubt pushes into my consciousness.

I loved my dance classes as a child and teenager, but despite dancing at a non-competitive studio, there were jealousies and body image issues, hurt feelings and worries of inadequacy.

I can remember fervently wishing I could reverse my body’s earlier-than-average development, uncomfortable in a body that wasn’t the sleek and lithe ideal of my dance teacher.

Thinking of Abbey ever feeling that way makes me cringe in pain.

But she expressed an interest in dance, and I thought it would be a perfect activity for her to ease into socializing with other kids without me present. 

At dance, she can work alongside other students, quietly getting comfortable with the other girls.  She can smile shyly and link hands and dance around the room without saying more than a word or two.

She always asks to go to class and always reiterates how much fun she has with her beloved teacher and her friends.

For now, I will choose to turn off Dance Moms.

I will focus on this season’s dancers on So You Think You Can Dance, young women with powerful legs and unbelievable extension and the ability to transform music into something tangible and magical.

I will focus on my own positive memories of my first pointe shoes and going to dance camp on a college campus and the way I still remember little bits and pieces of music and body positions and the feeling of a swirling skirt on stage.

I will focus on our afternoon dance parties, when music twists impatience into laughter.

For now, we will dance.

dance moves 

my first dance recital

I'm on the far right

the girl on the far left?

that's my roommate, both at dance camp and our freshman year of college

we never went to school together and wouldn't have met without dance

and I never would have traded her friendship, not even for slower developing breasts

dancer

muscles and tendons, pressed against skin

further defined by a sheen of sweat

glistening under lights

unseen hours condensed into minutes

effort made effortless

bodies unrestrained by gravity or ligaments

stretching gliding spinning leaping

grace and power articulated in space

transforming music into something more

the prompt:
"What you know" doesn't necessarily always mean "your comfort zone." For this week, take what you know out of your comfort zone. Switch it up. See where it takes you.

I might not "know" dance the way some people know dance.

But I do know I love it.

Bring on the Bare Necessities

In the darkened theater, you could hear the clickity clackity shuffle of little tap shoes and whispers to little shadows attempting to line up in a row; you could see their teacher sliding them into position and a certain cock of a head and elbow that identified one of the little dancers as our girl.

Chuckles and sighs of rememberence echoed throughout the audience as the familiar "Bare Necessities" from Disney's The Jungle Book cajoled the pocket-sized dancers to life.  Proud parents, like us, new to the recital scene smiled around the lumps in our throats, and vetern parents likely thought back to the days that their teen dancers first took the stage.

Abbey smiled and danced alongside the ten girls and one boy she met in September, the little peers she now calls "my friends" with a smile, even when she is still feeling shy enough to smile goodbye instead of yelling it across the room.  Her moves were confident, as were the steps of the dancers next to her, although we'll never know whose "interpretation" of the actual dance was correct, because they were all doing something just a little different most of the time.

In September, I wasn't sure we would make it to this day.  One of the youngest students, I worried she would be afraid of entering the classroom without me, of dancing next to girls her age without the protective mommy-barrier of our familiar playdates.

The first day she gripped my leg, her eyes impossibly wide and blue as an outgoing girl asked her name and tried to hold her hand.

But now?  She asked to wear mascara and looked eagerly for her friends as we walked down the hall to our specified waiting area.  When I went backstage after her dance to see if she wanted to sit with us until the finale before intermission, she chose instead to stay with the kids in her class, drinking juice boxes and huddling around a portable, impossible-to-hear Tangled DVD and some princess stickers.

Seeing her slowly blossom into this little girl over the course of this year means as much to me as seeing her on the stage smiling and tapping.  Well, it means almost as much.

Because, in my absolutely unbiased opinion, nothing that cute has ever graced a stage.

with her eternally patient and much loved teacher 

footie jammies requested at the end of the night

there's still a little bit of baby left there

sigh

The Rehearsal

goofing around

Crocs are NOT part of the costume 

hanging out 

she insisted on staying to watch some of the other dancers practice

Halloween - Take Two

Abbey's second celebration was her dance class party.  They were encouraged to wear costumes and allowed to bring a treat to share with the class.  She wanted to bring rice krispie treats, so we did, complete with butterscotch and mini chocolate chips pressed into the top.  I think she wanted to bring the bowl of frosting, but no such luck.

I was actually a little worried, because she mentioned a few times that she was planning on flying while in dance class.  She told me "Miss Amanda will attach me to a special wire," which is what happens to Angelina Ballerina when she is a magic fairy in one of the books.  I tried to explain to Abbey that she would only be pretend flying, using her imagination.  She seemed to understand, but you never know with two-year olds!

Thankfully, she seemed content to show Miss Amanda her magic fairy wand and give her a hug, despite being a little unsure about the crazy blue wig that accompanied her "Thing One" costume from The Cat in the Hat.

very serious about getting her bag ready for class

she told me, "Mommy, I can't smile right now.  I'll smile when I'm done." 

ready to go

she had time to smile now 

their teacher was very smart about their treats

we brought the treats near the end of class, where they were allowed to have one thing in the room before taking the rest home

Abbey chose a heart-shaped sucker

Tiny Dancers

At Abbey's studio, they close the blinds on the viewing window.  Parents are allowed to come into the class and watch for the last fifteen minutes of the last class of the month, which was this past  Wednesday.  Of course we all filed in to watch our mini dancers; like me, many of the moms are doing this for the first time and we're not exactly sure how they're doing in there!

It was fun to watch them follow their teachers.  Abbey did better than I expected in terms of listening, waiting her turn, and generally doing what she was supposed to be doing!  She smiled and looked like she was having fun, and she was talking to some of the other little girls.  So far, so good with our dance experiment!

Not to get all nostalgic, but I feel like this is really ushering in a new era for her, for me, for our family.  Despite her baby face and fierce attachment to Boop the giraffe, she's tumbling headfirst into that land of little girl.  I realized when I watched her talking with a girl in her class that she was starting to have actual conversations with her peers: Conversations that I couldn't hear (for better or worse, I guess!), articulating thoughts for herself, gingerly learning how to make friends on her own.  When did THAT happen?

(She later told me that she was talking to Cecilia about the "beautiful watch on her wrist".)

she's the one on the floor in the pigtails

making herself comfortable

trying to get into a circle

her teacher, Miss Amanda, is an angel with them

during a free dance time to Under the Sea

dance and freeze

they're great at the dancing and so-so with the freezing

Education, Capitalism, and Tutus

What, those things don't go together?

When Abbey goes to dance, I wait in the lobby.  I can leave her in the room by herself, but I'm not ready to leave the premises quite yet.  Besides, it's an opportunity for Dylan and me to hang out on our own, and I don't really want to spend it in a car.

The first week, we spent most of the time hanging out with a mom and her youngest son.  I also met her oldest son and saw her daughter.  All three were wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the name of an exclusive private school in our area for gifted students.  And by exclusive I mean crazy expensive.  I realize in some parts of the country, expensive grade schools are a dime a dozen, but where we live, even most of the private schools don't cost the equivalent of a year at Harvard.

Education is something I think about all the time, and those three shirts really made me consider the role money plays in education and the inexorable ties between the two.  The school in question, as I mentioned before, really plays up the fact that it is geared toward "gifted" children.  Don't get me wrong; the mother was lovely, and her youngest son was polite and articulate.  (Plus they couldn't compliment Dylan enough, which never hurts!)

But really?  Three truly "gifted" children in one family?  Yet, their parents are paying for them to be educated as gifted children, and they will never know an educational experience that isn't tailored to help them succeed in every way.  As a former teacher, I can only imagine the education that the teachers are able to provide at a school like that.  Tiny classes, involved parents, and curricular freedom to explore and work with student strengths, weaknesses, and (most importantly) interests.  That's just the beginning, because an education at a school like that can open academic doors all the way up the ladder of success.

Less than fifteen miles away, children are wasting away in classrooms without books, in buildings permeated with violence, in a district so plagued with problems that there are talks about the state taking over control of an entire public school district.  Teachers enter those classrooms with high hopes and dreams of educating those children but find themselves roadblocked by problems too extensive to get into in one blog post.  I know, because I worked in a school similar to those schools.

 

There are gifted kids in those schools, too.  I actually believe that the majority of children have the potential to thrive in the right environment, with the right tools and the right teachers to find their own particular gifts.  Knowing something happens in theory is one thing, but seeing it in practice is another, and it's tough to know that a thirty thousand dollar check, give or take a little, can buy a gifted label.  And though there are pitfalls to every situation, even the privileged ones, it's pretty obvious that a child with a thirty-thousand-dollar education enters the world on a different plane than the child who had to enter his or her classroom through metal detectors.

To lighten the mood, some pictures of my to-be-educated-by-public-schools-unless-I-win-the-lottery kids...

(If I did somehow win the lottery, miraculously since I don't buy tickets, I would buy them the best education I could find for them.  Which may or may not include a gifted label, because I don't know if that is a blessing or a curse, but that's another post, I think.)

ready for week two

the braid went back into a ponytail, but it keeps her hair out of her eyes

hanging out with Mommy

charming the ladies

flirting with the dancers

drooling on his shirt

all in an hour

on the move

because he likes to grab for the camera

Dance Like Nobody's Watching*

Abbey's birthday is in February, which means that she is a little young for most preschool programs in our area.  Not to mention that we weren't sure about sending her yet, anyway.  Those of you who spend time with our girl know that she can be slow to warm up to new situations.  Once she opens up, she is a chatterbox and a sparkling ball of hilarity (in my opinion of course!), but it can take a while for her to get there.  Like so many things in parenting, this presents a bit of a dilemma - would school be beneficial or traumatic?

We're dodging that decision for another year, but Ryan and I agreed that it could be helpful for all of us if she took some sort of class, on her own.  Like so many toddlers, she doesn't particularly like to listen to her father or me, so we thought we would see what would happen if she had another adult teaching her about listening and following directions.  Of course, there aren't tons of options for classes for little ones, especially since I didn't want to do a parent-tot class.  (I don't have anything against those sorts of classes; we did one when Abbey was littler.  However, I know how she acts when I'm in the room; I wanted her to have a chance to do something without me.)

So what to do?

Trying to keep her interests in mind, we found a dance studio that has a preschool class without a three-year-old age limit.  Abbey and I went to the studio, met the teacher, saw the classroom, and had several conversations about how I would not be coming into the class with her.  She seemed excited and prepared. 

I was excited.  Not prepared. 

When she put on the little leotard and tights, I was absolutely astounded by how grown up she suddenly looked.  Somehow, without any warning, she has morphed from our snuggly little baby to an independent little girl.  I walked her back to the classroom, and she calmly stayed with Miss Amanda.  If she cried, she didn't do it in front of me, and she didn't do it enough for them to come and get me!

Since that class, she has shown me what she learned multiple times and seems excited about her new adventure.  I've asked her about it so many times I'm beginning to annoy her.  The last time I asked, she said, "Mommy, I told you I liked my dancing.  Now I want to draw a lion."  I haven't quite relaxed about it one hundred percent, but I was able to breathe a little better after that.  We'll see how it goes this week!

we read an Angelina Ballerina book before bed about five nights a week

she LOVES Angelina

luckily Angelina has a little cousin, Henry, or she would already have Dylan in a tutu

Angelina again?

dressed up and ready for her first class

her little arms are blurry because she wouldn't stop dancing

still dancing in her clickity click shoes

checking to make sure her bow is straight

finally still

getting ready to go into class

*The quote is Satchel Paige - words to live by