Girls In Motion

After writing about how I put our youngest down to sleep, she look the harder route, only going to sleep when I lay down with her in the twin bed and dozed off myself. In the end, I'll take whatever works. As mentioned in my previous post, we have the bed rail on that bed, so she shouldn't fall out. That does not, of course, prevent her from climbing out. It's a little fuzzy in my mind because of the ungodly hour at which it happened, but I don't think she cried. I must have heard something though, because I got up and found her making her way downstairs. I picked her up, took her back to the twin bed, and spent most of the rest of the night there. Like I said, whatever works.

Speaking of a daughter's movement, yesterday was our older daughter's last dance class before the winter break, and it was an open rehearsal for which the parents were invited to come watch. So it was me and Lauren and a whole bunch of moms watching our 3- and 4- year-olds go through their dance class. It was revealing, in the sense that our daughter can never remember more than one thing she did in dance class on any particular day. "We did pwee-eh," or "we looked for a baby bear." Now I finally know what the heck she's talking about.

It was really cute, all these little girls running around and learning about movement and learning about following directions. Maybe it's just a limitation of the age, because I know I can hardly get her to do anything sometimes, much less to accurately mimic something, but there was a little voice in the back of my mind that was troubled that there wasn't a greater emphasis on correct form. I know, I know: they're 3 or 4. Kinesthetic sense isn't at its all-time high at this age. I just think about how, for instance, poor technique on piano that wasn't addressed early seemed to limit my own development as it became habit and never got corrected before I stopped playing with any regularity. But I know, I know: she's 3.

At one point, the teacher mentioned that so far they had just ordered a ballet costume for the recital in May, and wondered if we also wanted a tap costume. An indecisive, hushed murmur spread over the crowd of parents until I spoke up and said that no, the one costume would be fine. The fact was that we weren't really satisfied with how the one costume had been handled--we had to pay a deposit a couple weeks ago, but there hadn't been--and there still hasn't been--any indication of how much more than our deposit the costume is going to be.

And once I spoke up, the murmurs turned to agreement--even if they didn't want to say so, no one else particularly wanted to pay for a second costume either. Because, let's face it: they're 3 and 4. How many costumes do they really need?