Monday, April 03, 2006

Sunday Review - Dancing Scholarship Day

First day of winter time – i.e. non-daylight savings time – is supposed to give everyone a chance for an extra hours sleep in.  Well I got gypped because I have an early start today which means I have to be in by 8:00am.

The good thing though is that the 6:40am train is 80% empty and I pretty much have the top deck of Carriage #8 to myself.  It is probably worth considering using this train all the time…

The weekend was very busy.  I gave a run down of Saturday nights activities already, but Sunday was busy with Kate’s ballet scholarship competition being on.  The premise is simple, in each grade the ballet classes dance a series of routines / exercises and then do a rehearsal of their performance that they will do in their official exam in a couple of months and the best dancer gets a scholarship of a years free tuition.  That is probably a $600 prize or thereabouts.  Given that the dance concert at the end of the year has a 30cm high trophy up for stake, I would have thought that the Scholarship Day would have been ultra bitchy  with stage mum’s breaking other kids legs and all that.  But in fact it was the opposite with a fairly relaxed atmosphere and nobody got real bent out of shape.

The only issue I had was the duration (9:30 – 3:30) in which Kate performed first and we had to wait until the end for the announcements.  This was Kate’s first year of examinable ballet and she was in the “Primary” class and then there were Grades 1 thru 7.  You only advance in grade when you pass the exam and some kids take 2 years to do this… so Kate although only 6 (nearly 7) was competing against 8-9 year olds.  And the award wasn’t given to the “most deserving or promising” but the best, so it was a big ask to knock over kids much older than her.

She didn’t of course, but she did do really well and I was very proud to say that she was by no means in the bottom of her class of 14.  I am so surprised that she is so good at dancing given that I have two left feet, but she really loves it.  She said to us yesterday that she wants to be a professional dancer when she grows up… but don’t all little girls say that?

This left Sunday night to being my father-in-law’s Geoff birthday.  He turned 78 I think and is going great guns for his age.  We had dinner at their place but the girls (and their mum and I) were really tired so it was an early night and we were home by 8:30 – which felt later of course due to Day Light Saving.

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