Looong day

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:13:25 GMT

We left the house at 10 am and got home at 6pm, but in between we went to Kroger for hairspray, bobby pins, and a hairnet (and cheetos, scotch tape, and San Pellegrino Limonata, as one does); spent an hour and a half at the school carnival where it was hot and sunny and remarkably corporate although pleasant; ran to the Zoo, where the kids had (separate) classes and mr. flea and I sneakily ate ice cream cones, watched a nearsighted sloth, and canoodled on a bench; ran back to our neighborhood to the gym of a local Catholic school for a 2-hour+ rehearsal for Casper's dance recital, which ended in floods of tears, as much due to low blood sugar as the sense of failure for getting the leaps wrong in Dance, Dance, Dance.

I successfully put Casper's hair (which is still pretty short - was boy-short in October) all the way up into a semblance of a bun, with the tools mentioned above, plus gel. She looked quite different - both her teacher and our neighbor did not recognize her at first. She is incredibly beautiful; fine-boned, and all neck. Her dancing is great to watch. She has excellent arms, but a lot of trouble with toe-pointing.

I introduced her to the concept "Bad dress, good show," and hope she will be recovered by tomorrow.

Dillo really liked his one-hour Zoo class, and allowed as how it might actually be fun to go to a Zoo class every morning for a week. So I may have conquered his unreasonable fear of camps.

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enrichment

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:09:33 GMT

Not financial; rather the reverse of financial enrichment.

With Casper about to be 7, I'm thinking about activities. She's asked about dance classes; there are two studios (at least) in town, and they enroll for the school year. Prices are by number of hours a week she attends class, and seem reasonable ($50-100 a month for 1-2 classes a week). There are a few classes on weekends or late enough in the evenings that we could make it work. If she did the classic ballet/tap, we'd have to buy the clothes. There's also a hip-hop class for 5-7 year olds at 6pm one evening that looks cool, though.

I'd really like to get her into a musical instrument, though. I was made to take piano lessons at 6, and hated them, and stubborned my parents into letting me quit within about a month. I also had a slightly longer experience with Suzuki violin at the same age (my main memory being how much it hurt to hold the violin under my chin). I don't think my sister did any instrument, and my brother did trumpet through school for a couple of years and practiced approximately once every 6 months. mr. flea was in the drum corps in school; I'm not sure when he started. But my cousins had music lessons and were pretty serious (my oldest cousin still plays bassoon in an orchestra), and I think a) it's a good skill for a kid, and a kid who is somewhat mathematically-minded and artsy like Casper is likely to have a good experience with music and b) even basic-level lessons as a kid are great if it means you can sit down and play sing-along songs on a piano or guitar for the rest of your life, right? I sort of regret not having that skill, myself.

The Uggaversity has a community music school; they have a piano program for kids that starts at 5 and they have violin and cello starting at 4. It's $800 for the year, payable in installments, with one 30-minute private lesson and one 45-minute group lesson a week. The group lesson is held ebtween 4-6pm on Thursdays, which is kind of a problem, potentially, and I can't find anything on the web site about scheduling the private lesson (maybe more flexible?) The big deal here is, of course, the need for a piano. You can use a keyboard, but it has to be a fancy one, or of course we could obtain an actual piano. Either of these has the potential to be quite a bit costlier than a leotard and ballet slippers.

I dunno, and I should totally be worried about Dillo's birthday, in 10 days and completely unplanned, and not wasting brain cells on this, when sign-ups don't close for another month.

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