Rain Equals Late

Monday morning plus rain equals late trains.  I woke this morning, saw the rain, computed this fact and actually anticipated that the train would be late, so I didn’t rush at all.  Pretty sad when late becomes the norm.  For the record, it was 8 minutes this morning, but that is still “on time” according to State Rail.  Good on ya’s! Keep up the good work!

Monday morning though does mean that I tend to reflect on the weekend just passed.  Having taken an annual leave day on Friday, I have had a long weekend compared to the rest of the country and so I have the “post long weekend” blues.  The only difference is that I am the only one suffering from them!  D’oh!

Friday was our 10^th wedding anniversary, a significant milestone.  We are going away in 3 weeks time, so we kept the celebrations this weekend a little subdued.  We dropped the kids off to school and then went to a café/restaurant called “Mash” for lunch in the Glenbrook Village.  It was a great meal but the quirky menu was full of “organic” food.  For example Niki asked for a Diet Coke and the waitress said politely “sorry, we don’t have Coke, but we do have Organic Cola”.  WTF is Organic Cola!!  Anyways, the lunch was great, and we had some laughs…

Having Friday off though allowed me to go to Kate’s (my oldest) Ballet class.  She was selected to go this advanced class on Friday evenings and this was my first experience of “Dancing Mums”.  Niki warned me that some of the mums are a bit full on and that some of these girls, who are only four to seven years old, are dancing 7 days a week.  To me, I think kids sports are very important and I encourage all my girls to do something.  But to send your pre-school child to something 7 days a week is something akin to child abuse.  We really debated sending Kate to the Friday class (she goes on Monday’s as well) as we were worried about balancing school with all the other things in a little kids life, and yet here we are watching one mother video taping the teacher (yes the teacher, not her child) so that she can “replay” the lesson to her daughter in the comfort of their own lounge room!  Ridiculous!

With dancing however, the culmination of the effort is the half yearly and end of year concerts.  The half yearly is this Sunday and we (well Niki and the girls) are in a tizz about hair, makeup, shoes and tights and leotards.  Its all good, but I must admit the debate on hair curlers left me a little nonplussed.  But the funny thing was that whilst we’re standing in one of these hair product shops at the shops on Saturday, Niki was talking to the saleslady about the concert and getting some advice (we are both “concert virgins” remember) and the lady was very helpful.  She asked what dance school the girls went to and nodded approvingly when told.  She commented how expensive the classes are (my ears pricked up and now I am nodding) and then she says with a scornful tone “oh and yes, you spend so much money on dance lessons and then after 10 to 15 years they decide that they don’t want to do it any more!”  Well isn’t that normal?  I am not sending my girls with the “objective” that they grow up to be professional dancers… am I missing something here?

Well the concert is next Sunday and I will be there cheering my girls on (they only do one dance each over a 3 hour event!) and there will be plenty of pictures.  One of the other quirky things about these concerts is that video taping is not allowed.  I got to say that this is an appalling rule.  Every dad in the history of time takes the family video camera to the dance concert so he can not only capture the crucial 4 minutes that their child is on stage (out of the 180 minutes of other kids) but also to give him something to do for the remaining 176 minutes (172 in my case – two kids!).  There is light to consider, flash or no flash, checking the battery, getting the good position etc etc.  All that good stuff.  Instead, I just have to sit and watch!  Where’s the justice!!

Of course, to compensate for the lack of videotaping, the dance school has arranged for a “professional” to film the concert and charge us parents another $50 for a DVD of their child in which their 4 minutes has been condensed to 10 seconds, 7 of which they are probably partially obscured…. I will be pushing that the before and after stills will be sufficient for the recording of the event.