Having a little girl and sending her to dancing class is pretty much a rite of passage, right?? Within 2 seconds of finding out I was having a girl, I found myself dreaming of the day she would pirouette gracefully into her very first dance class, pink tutu swirling about her feet...
Then I gave birth to Fern. Darling, precious Fern.
Darling, precious Fern, however, has not shown any particular aptitude for dancing. She has a hard time walking in a straight line without tripping over her own feet (as does her mother a lot of the time, to be fair!) and my dreams of her as the lead in
Coppelia are fast disintegrating.
Today, I took Fern along to her very first dance class, along with a few others from our original mothers-group. It was ideal -- a casual affair where you pay by the week and where tutus are optional which is just as well, because I only decided to take her yesterday and an old pair of leggings and a tee embellished in sequins saying '
dance' are about all I could come up with at short notice!
The room was packed with little girls (and a couple of brave boys) aged 2-4ish, and when the music started they all jumped and stretched and swayed in tandem with the instructors, little squeals of delight tumbling from their cherub little mouths.
The mums all sat at the back of the room, smiling indulgently at their little ballerinas-to-be, perhaps mentally drafting their submissions to Juilliard in later years.
I excitedly extracted my video camera from my bag and pointed it at Fern, ready to capture the moment that would surely be replayed on So You Think You Can Dance, as the moment where it all begun.
I hit record.
And captured my dear daughter standing
still. as. a. statue. For pretty much the full 45 minutes.
To be fair, there was a moment when she became animated....... they gave her a yellow jelly-snake at the end and she quite liked that.
But otherwise? She just looked totally shell-shocked. Clearly, the other children had all done this before. And most were a little older. They all seemed to know what was coming and what to do. But Fern was so totally out of her element!
Will I take her back? Oh, probably. She didn't cry at least, and that has to be a good thing! And perhaps it's going to take more than one lesson to kickstart that journey to
Swan Lake. But gosh darn, what a laugh for the stage-mum-wannabe (that would be me)!
Check it: (Fern is the one standing on the far right in the little ponytail, in case you can't tell!):
Tell me about your child's first dance class... Was it an anticlimax? Or were you dazzled with their grace and poise?! Did you go back?!
