Today marks her third class, and she loves it!

First Day of Ballet!

The parents are not allowed back in the dance room, so we’re relegated to sitting out in the waiting room and watching on a large black and white TV monitor. The screen is split into four sections, so that regardless of where our little ballerinas are standing (or twirling), we’ll be able to see them.

Claire picked out her own leotard and shoes. This is a class through our Rec Center, so they aren’t as stringent on the clothing rules as the “real” ballet schools are. She wanted the hot-pink butterfly one, so that’s the one she got. We both thought the black ballet shoes went well with her ensemble.

I tied her hair up in a ponytail and then tried not to cry.

Just like Claire, I was really excited for the first class to get here. The fact that I needed to hold back tears startled me. My baby is isn’t a baby anymore, and I’m happy about that. But there was just something about watching her follow the teacher’s direction on the screen that nearly made me lose it. She’s like this little girl now…

But, I kept it together, and none of the other moms were the wiser.

She LOVED the class, and she did really well!  She did so well, in fact, that the teacher asked me afterward which other Ballet Classes she’s been in. I was shocked. This was her first Ballet Class. She’s been dancing around the house en pointe for a long time now, and when she asked to take classes, we had to wait for her age to match the criteria.

The teacher told me that she knows the ballet positions already. She showed her once, and she got it…just like that.

I don’t even know the Ballet Positions. In fact, I had to have a friend tell me that what Claire was doing by dancing on the tops of her toes actually had a name (the en pointe I mentioned above…)

Apparently one of the skeletons in our closet is that of a famous Ballerina?

So, we’re going to foster this. She loves it, and she’s really good at it. I’m not enrolling her in a daily routine at a hard-core school, but we are going weekly from now until December. When she’s a bit older, she can decide how much she wants to pursue this.

In the meantime, she’s trying to teach me all her moves…and we actually look forward to Mondays.