Jazz Hands!

Yesterday Raia and I drove to a local dance studio to see about signing her up for dancing lessons. She's been asking to take ballet lessons for a couple of years now, even checking out the "Baby Ballet" video from the library a few times in order to have her own in-home lessons (which she would do while wearing a swimsuit, a dress-up tutu, and her church shoes -aka "tap shoes"). But, when we got to the studio, they said their ballet classes were full. Jazz and tap were still open, so I thought Jazz would be a good start for her, since it has very similar moves to ballet, and we could move her into ballet next year.

Many times while I was filling out the forms she whispered to me "I want to do ballet" "I want ballet shoes" "Mommy, I want to take a ballet class". I tried explaining to her that ballet wasn't going to happen this year, but she was insistent.

That is, until the instructor let Raia in on a little secret. This year's costume for the Jazz dancers to wear in the end-of-the-year recital is pink. And sparkly.

Sold.

There was no more mention of ballet after that.

I paid for a year's worth of lessons (ouch) and a pair of jazz shoes. We'll be hitting the stores this week to try to find her some comfortable sweats to wear to her lessons (pink, of course), and then she starts on the 16th. Officially, at least. She already had daddy find her some Jazz dance instruction videos online for her to dance along with, so she'll getting a little bit of a head-start. She is so excited. :)

Supahstah!