Lily had her first dance recital last weekend!
She has really been loving dance class this year which is a relief after her experience last year. Even though her class makes our Thursday evenings a little rushed I’m so glad that she’s doing dance and loving it.
In January the girls got to choose the color for their recital costume. Amazingly, in a class of seven 4 and 5 year old girls only two of them chose pink. The rest went for blue, including Lily.
We had a rehearsal on Friday night and the girls did great. Lily marched right out on stage and even gave us a little wave as the music started. Keep reading to get to the video of this performance. I’m glad that we got a video of the rehearsal since that allowed us to just watch the actual recital. We’re going to get a copy of the entire recital DVD so we’ll have the official dance.
The recital was on Sunday evening and I have to admit that I was a little nervous about the whole thing! This was our first recital and I didn’t want to be late or have any wardrobe malfunctions or anything of the sort. I got inspired by one of the other girls in the class who had her hair in a bun for the rehearsal and decided to give it a go with Lily’s hair on Sunday. While it wasn’t perfect, it was a ballerina bun! The trick is to style it while her hair is still really wet. It helps to get rid of all of the lumps when her hair is combed back.
We got to the theater about 30 minutes before the show start time and it was already packed. We did, however, manage to find several seats together in the back row of the bottom level. Lily’s class was the fourth dance so we were supposed to meet back stage about 15 minutes before the show started. I took her back stage and met up with the rest of her class. The girls were all excited and bouncing around which is where I think I made my first mistake. I was afraid that Lily’s bun would fall out if she got too crazy so I was telling her not to jump around too much. Now, I will say that we had been told to keep the kids quiet back stage so my telling her to be calm served dual purposes. Although, I kind of feel like if I had laid off a little and let her play around more she would have worked out some nerves and we could have avoided the pre-show tears.
Yep. Shortly before the first dance started Lily looked back at me with her sad face and tears welling up in her eyes. I immediately got down and gave her a hug and tried to find out what was wrong. She said that she just didn’t want to do her dance. ACK! We talked through how much fun it was going to be and how she had been practicing so she could do her dance for everyone. Her teacher came and gave her a hug. This whole time I was thinking about how disappointed she would be if she didn’t do the dance. Also thinking about Jason sitting in the audience and the grandparents and friends and family who had come and what a bummer it would be if they didn’t get to see the dance. After a few more minutes of talking and assuring her that I would stay back stage during the dance she finally gave me a smile. And then we made silly faces at each other for a couple of minutes. She had one more small panic right before her class took the stage but she recovered quickly and walked on stage holding her teacher’s hand.
The dance was great and you would have never guessed that she had been crying 5 minutes earlier! As promised, I watched the dance from the wings and gathered her up right after she got off the stage. We returned to our seats where she got some flowers from Grandma and Grandpa and got to have lots of hugs and kisses. We visited with some friends during intermission and then Lily said she was ready to go to dinner rather than stay and go on stage at the end of the show. Fine by us!
Later, Lily asked us why she got sad before her dance. I’m sure that nervousness and anxiety are difficult feelings for a four year old to comprehend. We just tried to explain that sometimes we get a little scared before we do something really big and important or exciting. It’s OK and we just have to take a deep breath.
So incredibly proud of my big girl!
