My Two Cents: Dance, the first year.

As much as I hate to admit it, I cried a little bit yesterday. There was my baby girl, up on a massive stage with colorful lights shining down twirling around with a big fat smile on her face. And she did such a good job!! She even liked it!!

This past season with Rhythm Dance Center has been completely impressive. Things that impressed me the most:

Any time I've stopped by the studio, there are almost always an equal number of dads standing around waiting for their little princesses as there are moms.

The teachers never lose their patience. Everyone is bubbly all of the time.

Everything is high quality, original, and professional from the shoes to the show.

Communications are thorough and timely.

Dance ain't cheap. Good Lord.

So anyway, yesterday was our first dance recital. Because the show was located at Georgia Tech's Ferst Center, we were strongly advised to apply make up and glitter to our children so that we could see their facial features when they were on stage. While there was a part of me that wanted to balk at the idea (she's only four!!), there was this little eensy part of me that was excited about playing with make up with my little girl. So, I embraced the little flicker of excitement and bought a few pieces of make up at the grocery store and started practicing make up application about a month before the show.

By the way, putting make up on a four year old is a skill. Imagine filling in eyebrows, applying eye shadow, mascara, blush, lip liner, and lipstick to a tiny little face that blinks 1,000 times a minute and is constantly asking questions and looking around to see if daddy sees how pretty she is.

A cool thing about having your child wear make up: you will see a drastic reduction in temper tantrums when you tell them that tears will mess it all up.

Fallon's dance routine was called "Tiny Tinkerbells." It was a tap routine led by an older girl (maybe 10 years old?) who was part of the studio's competitive company. I really couldn't tell you how the whole routine went though, I was too focused on my own kid. The dress rehearsal was held a few days before the actual show, and that's when I was able to capture most of my pictures since no one had an issue with me setting my camera on the actual stage and clicking away. The only real difference between the rehearsal and the recital was that Fallon remembered a few more steps in the routine during the recital. Oh, and we only spent about 20 minutes at the Ferst for the rehearsal. And there weren't millions of people there for the rehearsal.

Let me just say that we thought we knew what we were getting into on Saturday morning. We didn't. So. many. people.

As we approached the crowd, I turned to Emmanuel and told him that today, I didn't care how impolite we had to be. We were going to get our child checked in on time, and we were going to sit in the front row of the theater.

And we did.

Dancer check in

Slow pokes

During the recital, I took 449 pictures. I didn't really mean to take that many, but the routines kept coming and they were all so beautiful and different that I just had to capture them all. There were three hours of dance routines back to back to back. We saw contemporary, ballet, tap, hip hop, modern, jazz, and some other combinations I couldn't label at every skill level with no down time in between. And no one fell down.