My child is a Speshul Snowflake**

Remember last year's winter dance recital, with the cute hairdo and the almost complete lack of dancing by my daughter?

This year we almost didn't get that much, as we spent all day listening to "I don't want to go. I don't want to go. I don't want to go." Listen to that for half a day, and I'm inclined to either shoot her or pull her out of dance classes entirely. After a great deal of bargaining, reasoning, and chocolate-coated bribery, we got her there, and she was doing okay-ish ...

"Blah blah JUMPING ON DADDY'S CHAIR!!!"

... right up until it was time for the show to start, and she started blubbering like a bad soap opera actress. I was in the audience, she was sitting with the rest of her class in front of the stage, and I was very close to just calling the whole thing off ... but she pulled herself together.

"If I look interested enough in this dot-to-dot, maybe they won't make me go on stage."

At least, she did until it was time for her to perform with her class, at which point the waterworks started again, and she had to be carried on stage (not by me). After a 10-second pep talk by her dance teacher, we got to see her dance, on stage, in public, for realz, for the first time ever.

And she was fine the whole time, doing way more of her dance than I expected, managing to not freak out when the entire class managed to blank out during the whole "switch lines front to back" part at the end, and even sort of smiling for the pictures at the end.

And then she sat and watched the rest of the acts, and was all set to go sing in the big finale ... until she somehow managed to pinch her finger while she was waiting to go onstage, and she completely lost it, and I got to stand off to the side with my irritable crying child. Yes, out of seventeen acts and probably 70 kids, mine was the only one that cried. At all. The entire night. She didn't even want to go up and get her goody bag from her teacher, and usually the promise of candy canes is enough to get the kid to walk through walls of flames.

Turns out, she was just holding out for the floral tribute, courtesy of Daddy.

"Why yes, I was perfect - why do you ask?"

I swear, every time we do something like this, it takes six months off of my life expectancy, and it exponentially raises the amount we need to contribute to the kid's Future Therapy Fund. I so very much want to pull her out of dance classes, but she claims she loves dance with a passion that burns like a thousand suns. Never mind that I have to coax her into dressing for class, drag her to class, and she never is excited about anything at class other than whether she got a good sticker and/or got to turn on the lights in the room. At the very least I think I'm going to have her skip the spring recital, because I am just not up to having to pay $100 for costumes and tickets so that I can deal with this two years in a row.

** Speshul Snowflake, definition 3.

Well, I guess I have to talk about this sometime

Saturday was supposed to be Liza's dance recital.  I say "supposed to be" because she didn't actually make it to the performance, preferring instead to go completely batshit crazy backstage for an hour.  

The combination of tons of kids all (loudly) getting ready to perform, me saying I needed to go sit in the audience while she stayed backstage with her friends, and the time of day all conspired against Liza, leading to a meltdown (literally ... she was wearing mascara, which is now all over my dress) of epic proportions.  She was utterly inconsolable, to the point where I really wanted to smack some sense into her, which of course wasn't exactly going to work.  After the fourth little kid came over and asked why she was crying, I decided it wasn't worth getting the other kids upset and ruining their recitals, too, so we left.

Out of the maybe 50 or 60 kids performing that day, mine was the only one who melted down for more than five minutes.

I hear the rest of her class performed admirably well.

I, meanwhile, fumed for the rest of the day.  I discovered that when I'm insanely pissed off, I can turn an ill-fitting sweater back into a pile of yarn balls in less than 5 minutes, and I can knit a third of a sweater in an evening.  

For the benefit of my parents, who drove for 9 hours from Delaware so that they could see Liza not make it onstage, here's my crappy video of her dress rehearsal.

Today was all kinds of not awesome

It didn't start off too badly, what with actually getting my shopping list made in less than four hours and getting to take a shower while the kid was parked in front of the television.  I dropped Liza off at school, ran over to the grocery store and shopped like a bat out of hell, in hopes of a) having something other than month-old cheese and mayonnaise in the fridge for dinner tonight, and b) getting done fast enough to actually accomplish something at home before having to pick up the kid.  I blew through the store like I had rocket fuel for breakfast, then I found the shortest checkout line and I waited ... and waited ... and waited.  Trust me to find the line manned by the four-foot-tall, 90-year-old woman with no urge to hurry and no desire to just type in the damn SKU already, if it didn't scan the first six times, it's not going to change now omg I'm going to kill her keep smiling keep smiling so she won't see it coming.

Ahem.  Despite that delay - did I mention it took 15 minutes for me to check out?  And there was no one in front of me in line?  Gahhhhhh - I managed to find a few minutes to get caught up on computer stuff, but I lost track of time and had to drive a bit faster than usual in order to not be horribly late for Liza's pickup time.  She was the last kid there, of course, and was on the teacher's lap with a paper towel in her mouth and tears in her eyes.  Apparently there had been a miscommunication about exactly who was getting off of the playground see-saw when, which ended with Liza falling off and biting her tongue.  And subsequently drooling blood all down the front of her shirt - you know, the Hanna Andersson shirt that I finally managed to convince her to wear despite her pleas of "But that's the shirt I wore on the letter E day when I threw up all over the floor at school!"  Dude, that was in October.  Get over it.

Or, not.  Guess that shirt really is bad luck.  Here's hoping the blood comes out as easily as the puke did!

My afternoon plans of shopping for more flowers for the yard were shot thanks to Bleedy McSwollentongue, so we went home and nursed her with a popsicle and some cuddles, which seemed to clear things up nicely.  After a while of reading and playing on the couch, it suddenly occurred to me that yesterday was the 10th, which meant today was the 11th (wow!  the intellect involved in making that leap!), and somehow that sounded like the day that Liza was supposed to get her picture taken with the rest of her dance class, but I thought that was on Tuesday?  I shuffled upstairs to check the paperwork, and yes, she needed to be at the studio in costume and full makeup in, um, half an hour.  And I still hadn't altered the dress or hat to actually fit her.  Ulp.

You have never seen someone get a kid ready for a photo shoot so fast in your life.  Into the shower - out of the shower - into a robe - tons of hair gel and bobby pins - add hairpiece to make her bun look less pathetic now that she's got short hair - shorten straps on costume - make hat somewhat close to actually sort of fitting after the fourth alteration - powder/blush/mascara/eyeshadow/lip gloss - find tights and tap shoes - pack extra gel and hairspray and bobby pins - write a check to get a copy of the photo I'm killing myself to get the kid into on time - and, done!

Yes, I drove her to the studio while she was wearing underwear and a bathrobe.  She doesn't own any shirts that open wide enough to get over the Massive Bun of Plastic Hair without messing it up, and there wasn't time to finagle anything remotely clothes-like, so we went for speed.  If only I could have found some really large sunglasses and a very small dog for her to bring with her, she'd have looked very divalicious.  Except the robe is a really pilled polarfleece one I got for $2 at the resale shop ... but I don't think anyone noticed, mainly because they were so shocked that I had actually given in and done Liza's hair the way the Hair Nazi studio owner had decreed.  I have been threatening for weeks to boycott the ugly slicked back bun hairdo - seriously, it took dozens of pins to contain Liza's hair in that style for the 45 minutes I needed to get her to the photo shoot and back, it's not going to work any better when she's got to be in a dance recital for three hours with no adults around to fix it when she decides it's fun to throw herself backwards bunfirst at the floor.  I am very curious what the Hair Nazi would do if we showed up for the recital with her hair pulled away from her face but not up in a bun ... I sort of think the pile of abandoned tap shoes in the studio waiting room is left from previous students who decided to be conscientious objectors to the hair policy.

Yeah, so, anyway ... we pulled up at the studio so fast that I think little cartoon smoke clouds were spurting out from behind our tires, and I had the kid stripped naked and into her costume in about 45 seconds flat.  We got there 10 minutes after we were supposed to show up, but at least 10 minutes before they were scheduled to actually take the picture, and she looked reasonably presentable, so I consider it a success.  The place was a madhouse, and the costume hats are like four feet wide, and I spent the next 15 minutes utterly convinced that she was either going to wipe out some little kid with that hat, or it would get stuck on some parent's coat and rip the fake hair right off of my kid.  But neither happened, so all of that extra hair gel and all those spare bobby pins were for naught.

After her photo we got her into some regular clothes and drove home, where she asked for a snack and then fell asleep face-down on the couch, leaving a Frisbee-sized puddle of drool on the slipcover while I fixed dinner.

And now I'm looking at the list of summer activities I've thought of having Liza try, trying to work out a schedule for that which includes a couple activities on different days but leaves plenty of free time for just hanging out ... it's going to be, um, fun.  I feel like an air traffic controller trying to fit 453 things into five slots, and oh, look, here comes Air Force One.  Because it all sounds fun, and she has actively said she wants to try all of it, and I could sooooo use a break a couple of times a week to actually complete a thought without having to answer 14 versions of "What if?" worst case scenario questions ("But what if Jimmy finds out about my party, and he comes, and HE wants to go on everything first?"  Dude, the party was over a week ago, and Jimmy didn't come, and you got to go on everything first, so just leave it the fuck alone, okay?).  But since I'm not going to be able to fit gymnastics, dance, cheerleading, yoga, swimming lessons, theatre classes, dinosaur classes at the natural history museum, and a summer camp at the Lake Erie Nature Center all into one summer, something's got to give.  

I think it may be my brain.

Friday fun

Friday was the observation class for Liza's dance school, and boy, was that a whole bunch of bad dancing to watch. Four-year-olds are cute, but most of them can't dance worth anything ... and mine was the worst of the bunch. Check out her patented "ignore the beat, and the choreography, and the direction I'm supposed to face" approach to dance ... the recital is going to be painful.

After class we took a friend to the paint-your-own-pottery place to celebrate Liza completing the green level in her Hooked on Phonics set. It cost about the same as having a mess of kids over for pizza, and we get a (really ugly) lasting reminder of how smart the kid is!


Remind me to post a picture of the little Rembrandt with her masterpiece once it's back from the kiln. I sat on my hands and let her do the whole thing by herself (except the final tracing of the crown so you could tell what that lumpy brown thing on the front is), and boy, is it going to make a fashion statement in our kitchen. That thing is going to look like a cat threw up on it. Oh, well - as long as she's happy with it, blah blah blah.

I'm going to be away from the computer for the next few days, so don't start calling mental institutions if you don't hear from me, okay?

What to say, what to say?

Preparing for the big recital - note the official Ballet Bun and light makeup that (mostly) concealed where she and Penelope attempted to headbutt each other Friday night. Try not to notice the worried expression.

I had to pry her off of my leg so I could help distribute programs, and by the time she was supposed to perform I was only giving about 30% odds that she would actually make it on stage. She made it, though, as did everyone else in the class, and they all made it through the dance. As was to be expected from a class of 3- and 4-year-olds, it was pretty painful to watch, but at least now we've got it over with.

Here's most of it, should you be interested. Liza is easy to spot - she's the one on the left of the front row standing stock-still for most of the song**.

But hey, at least she didn't bolt!

And the Big Girl Ending - Ta-Dah!

I got so many inquiries about the legwarmers I made for the girls as Christmas presents, I may just have to start making them to sell. What do you think?

**I told Liza how proud I was of her performance, and I asked her what it was like to be on the stage. "I stood there," she said, and I asked her what she was thinking when she stood there. "I wanted to go jump off the stage." Actually, if you watch the video closely you can tell she was scanning the crowd looking for someone (us? cookies? Santa? who can tell?), and that it was taking every bit of her effort to keep her shit together. THAT'S why I'm proud, not because she managed a couple wrong-way twirls.

I've spent the past three years telling her that being brave doesn't mean you're never scared, it just means that when you're scared you go ahead and try it anyway. I guess it finally got through to her. Brava, baby girl.

Excuse me?!?!

"Okay, if you're not going to take a nap, please go get dressed so we can go to Target."
"I don't want to go to Target. I want to swing."
"That's nice, but we have to go today. You have your dance class tomorrow, so there won't be time to do it then."
"But ... you could go to Target while I take my dance class. Is that a good compromise?"

"Um, it would be, but Target is too far from the dance studio to make it there and back before your lesson is done. Nice try, though."

****
Since when? Say what? Huh?

Sorry, I'm having a few problems adjusting to the Teflon Wonder Child, who seems to have temporarily replaced VelcroBaby.

Now what the hell am I going to blog about? A month of houseplant photos? Cat puke I've discovered this week? What I had for lunch?

Bah.

MAH PRESHUS BABY IS A DANCER!!!

Okay, so mommies aren't allowed in the studio, and we're not even supposed to peek through the window because it distracts the girls, so my selection of photos from today is pretty limited. That didn't stop all of us from milling around at the edges of the window, sneaking looks from a vantage point where we could see the girls reflected in one of the mirrors but we didn't think they could see us. Not ideal conditions for photography, but I did manage to sneak a few, such as "Dancer listening to the rules of the class"

And "Dancers enjoying a break" (which I took by sneaking just the camera up over the bottom ledge of the window - just call me Smart)

And "You want me to do what with these tappy things?"

Notice that none of them feature my daughter crying, whining, or clinging to me like Velcro brand hook-and-loop fasteners. And they were taken over the course of an entire 55-minute class.

SCORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not only did she make it through me leaving her there without so much as a wave, she didn't even snivel the entire time, even when "Miss Mo wanted me to join in with all the other girls but I didn't want to so I watched and then I joined in after a while," which in the past has been a major trigger for her. She didn't burst into tears when I came in to pick her up at the end ... and she gave the teacher a hug even though she'd never seen her before today, and she agreed to go to Burger King afterward so she could have lunch and play with one of the girls in the class. And she didn't burst into screaming when she saw there were other kids on the play equipment, or when the other kids ran into her, or when the baby tried to borrow her kid's meal toy.

For one brief, shining, two-hour period, I had a normal kid.

And now she can't stop talking about how nice her teacher is and how much fun the class is and how much she likes her shoes and how much fun the class is and how she was supposed to join in to the Mickey Mouse clubhouse song but she didn't want to and then she watched the rest of the girls and she DID join in, and can we go back again NOW and will Leah be there and when will it be Friday again and did I mention she liked the class?

From the bottom of my heart, thank you, Liza.

Then and now

Then ...

Now ...

MAH BABY STARTS DANCE CLASS TOMORROW AND LOOKS SO PRESHUS AH CAN HARDLY STAND IT! And she probably won't take off the tights or the leotard until after her class, possibly not until she has to get dressed for swim class Saturday!

Look, she knows second position already! She called this the "dancer who is afraid of thunder during a storm" dance.

How do I know she's going to have a great career in dance? She's got the basics down already without any prompting from me ...

How scary is that picture? She just started this last week when we moved the scale to paint the bathroom. I swear, she has almost never seen me even step on the thing, much less get upset over the number it displayed. Now she obsessively checks her weight every time she sees the thing, like some sort of anorexic supermodel with a massochistic streak. The funny part is that she doesn't recognize numbers higher than about 15, and sometimes she reads them out backwards, so her weight varies from "0-3" to "3-3" pounds over a week.

Plus, the poochy tummy cracks me up.