In case you’re just joining us, Charlotte has been a dancing machine almost since she started walking. While she might not take the traditional girly route with baby dolls (she prefers stuffed animals) she is all girl when it comes to ballerina’s and dance. Since I never really got into the whole dance thing I’ve been a little unsure about what to do and whether or not Charlotte would actually like it when it came down to someone telling her how to dance as opposed to just her free-spirited dancing. I shouldn’t have worried!
In our family we have some dancers who have taken from a particular studio for years. It’s very close to our house so we were more than happy to jump on board. We attended recital this year to get a feel for dancing on the big stage and what Charlotte will do next year and she loved every second of it. So, being the over-planner that I am, I started asking about signup for the fall and summer dance camp months ago. At the beginning of May I finally got to sign Charlotte up for camp in the summer and was a little unsure when I saw that it was from 2-2:45. Yikes! That’s right during nap time! But I figured that we’d power through and pray hard that it would all work out.
Santa brought Charlotte a new pair of ballet shoes and tap shoes for Christmas but with a little baby in the house we didn’t want to be tapping all over the place. Charlotte was overjoyed — to steal a fancy word from Fancy Nancy — when we finally brought the tap shoes back out the weekend before dance camp started. I think this video of her with them on for the first time conveys pretty well her excitement!
On Monday we established our no-nap, dance camp routine. As soon as lunch was over it was “rest time” and Charlotte had to lay on the couch, snuggle under a blanket, and watch some of a movie and Mickey. Let’s just say that she wasn’t pitching a fit to have to lay on the couch and watch tv. This turned out to be a really good routine and, while she was definitely sleep deprived by the end of the week, I think she was able to save enough energy to avoid most major meltdown moments.
Before dance camp started when anyone would ask her what she was going to wear to camp she would say that she was going to wear her blue leotard. Well, when the day finally came, she changed her mind and decided to wear her purple one with the skirt. We took some pictures before leaving for her first day of camp and she looks so grown up to me with her leotard, hair in a ponytail, tights, and her Kitty dance bag with her shoes in it!
I wanted to get there early on the first day but when we got there we realized that we were TOO early! No one else was there and the studio wasn’t even open. Charlotte was a good sport though and it might have helped that we got to watch her teacher get there so that she got to see her again before camp started.
The first two days she was a little unsure and started crying before Miss Michelle took her from me. She only cried for a minute or two though before she was having fun. And by Wednesday she walked right in without a backwards glance! Success! And in the effort of full disclosure, I had butterflies in my tummy that first day too walking in to a new place and being unsure of doing something wrong. New things are just kind of scary!
I think it was a great idea to get her in for camp instead of just waiting for the fall because with five days of dance in a row she was comfortable by the end, whereas if we had just started going once a week in the fall she might not have gotten comfortable until Christmas. August is still a long way away but hopefully she’ll remember her teacher and feel better about starting back with this week of camp under her belt!
I didn’t want to show many pictures from camp because I want to respect the other kids privacy but in this one you can really only see Charlotte (in purple) and it’s blurry at that so I figured that it would be ok! The theme for camp was “Hawaiian Princess” and they spent all week doing Hula dances and talking about Lilo and Stitch! We really need to break out of copy of that soon because Charlotte had never seen it and now talks about Stitch all the time.
I loved the fact that the studio has a two way mirror and that I could watch her dance the entire time. I was so impressed with her for paying attention and doing so much of what her teacher was trying to teach them. And SO IMPRESSED with her teacher for being so patient and sweet and actually teach these girls something in a week’s time! Charlotte now does plies and arabesques and sashay’s all around the house. The cutest thing might be her trying to “glue” her feet together to get into first position. Our poor pigeon toed child might never make it as a ballerina because she has to work to get her toes pointed straight ahead much less out!
Charlotte also definitely had opinions on not liking ballet. On Monday evening she told me that she liked wearing ballet shoes but she didn’t like DOING ballet. She also didn’t really like doing arm motions and only really participated in the tap session with her feet. She’s quite the character! I don’t want to push her into something that she doesn’t want to do so I made sure to ask her on Monday when we left if she liked gymnastics (which she talks about all the time) or dance better to see if we might should just forget the dance thing. She made me feel better when she thought about it and then said, “I like them both the SAME!”
She was all smiles at the end of the week and is a little sad now that she doesn’t have dance every day now. We’re looking forward to a fun class starting this fall and seeing what recital looks like next spring!
