Monday, March 10, 2008

Dance Class

In all the excitement over Matt leaving, I forgot to blog about Emma's dance class on Saturday. As I said last post, Rachel and Julia were with a group of 4Hers, having a really cool meeting (this is an aside, but since I think it's such a great idea I will digress a moment...) about disaster preparedness. Apparently a lot of folks in Katrina died because they were unwilling to evacuate without their pets, so Long Island 4H clubs are forming a pet evacuation program in the horrific event that a killer storm hits Long Island in the future.

Anyway, with Rachel and Julia out for half the day, Matt and I decided to bring Ben to see Emma's last dance class. The way Miss Gail runs the class is not with a formal recital performance (which would be hard to do since each class session only runs 7 weeks!) but just that the families are invited to come and watch the last class. Ben had wanted to sign up for dance class himself, but because the classes run by age (3 year olds at 10, 4 year olds at 11, 5 year olds at noon) we weren't willing to have half the day taken up that way, and he missed out.

He watched avidly, and was really enjoying himself. The class is small, only 4 girls, and one was absent. So when it came time to do leaps, Miss Gail asked Ben if he wanted to participate--and he immediately jumped up and got into line. He did every single thing she asked, and had a huge smile on his face. The coolest thing was how Emma reacted to him joining the class. Matt and I have been surprised that she is so quiet during class--she hardly talks to Miss Gail and is just very shy, which is completely unlike her. But as soon as Ben took part, she blossomed. She wanted to be right next to him at all times, and every time they rested she held onto his arm and they would hug and kiss with big smiles. It was really cute.

I spoke to Miss Gail afterwards when she said that Ben did so well at everything, and told her how he wanted to be in the class but we just couldn't spend that much time. She said that next time we could have them both in the 4 year old class (signing them into the appropriate age level but then bringing them to the middle class) which I thought was a fine idea. It will solve the problem of them both being able to dance, and also give us a bit more time to get there in the morning, which is always good--you'd think with 4 kids we'd be up early enough to get out the door somewhere by 10, but in actuality we are usually a bit late to something that early. A win win situation!

--Jen

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