dancer

When you reach that age when you reach that point where you start to feel the beginning twinges of baby fever, there are things that you think of in your baby feverish fantasies.  It's not the bed full of barf at 3am, it's not the sweat-inducing grocery store trips where you leave without milk because someone threw a tantrum and crapped through their pants, it's most certainly not the extra ten pregnancy pounds you'll never get rid of.  (Like ever.)  It's days like today that you dream about.  Sunny Saturday mornings when you'll dress your little girl in her very first leotard and tiny pink ballet slippers and scrape her wisps of white blonde hair into a tiny requisite ponytail and take her to her first dance class.  Where you'll follow her through the front door, and in her trademark Vivi exuberance, she'll exclaim to everyone waiting in the lobby, arms thrown out wide: "I'm here for my dance cwass!  I'm a DANCER!"  Where, as you sit against the wall watching with the other mommies, she'll break from the group.  Just for a moment.  Run to you full speed, put a tiny little hand on each side of your face, smooch your lips, and say "I'm having FUN at my dance cwass!  I love you, mommy!"

There were tears, yall.  None from her, as she yanked off her Uggs and pulled on her "dance swippers" and left me in the dust as she skipped into the studio.  The tears were all mine, as I sat there on the sidelines, in awe of the little girl she's becoming.  Her unshakable confidence, her boundless energy, her instinctually social ways of making new friends everywhere she goes.  Her kindness, in grabbing the hand of a little girl crying for her mama during dance class, smiling brightly, and saying "awww, it's okay!  Just dance wiff me!"

There's no way of knowing if dance will stick for Vivian.  I've got no grand plans to raise a ballerina here.  It may be that she will find herself excited by soccer, or gymnastics.  Or that she will be happy to spend sportless afternoons tucked away in her bedroom reading books.  Whatever she embraces, I'll embrace, too.  I love my girl, and I love what she loves.  But for today, I love my little dancer and her little dancy ways.

And afterward, with A and MG enjoying a morning with very good friends, V and I did downtown.  A coffee/donut date, some shopping, lots of oohing and aahing at window displays and "sparkly" snow piles and "twinkling" (read: flashing) crosswalk signs .... whatever struck her little fancy.

The very best kind of Saturday.