My Little Ballerina

Last week Lily went to her first ballet class! It was pretty close as to who was more excited, me or Lily. But I think Lily wins. Every day for over a week before she started, she would ask, “Is my ballet class open yet, can I start today?” Such a sweetie.

Of course, the actual class experience wasn’t quite what she thought it would be. She seemed to be doing fine, and I wasn’t supposed to be in the room anyway, so I dropped her off and went to the park across the street with Michael. But when we came back, she was sitting by herself while everyone else was dancing. I tried to coax her to get back out there for the last five minutes, but she was done. Her teacher said she had participated off and on, but had sat out quite a bit. When we got in the car, she finally opened up about the reason why she was uncomfortable. Her reason: her teacher was a boy.

So then we had a talk about how boys can be ballerinas too, and that since she wasn’t going to get a different teacher, she needed to learn to like the teacher she had because he really was nice and was happy to have her in his class. She also confessed that she thought all the little girls in her class were going to stare at her. I don’t know when she decided that she was that shy, but apparently she is, so we’ll see how next week goes. I think it’ll just take her another week or so to get used to it.

Since the parents aren’t allowed in the room, I don’t have any of her with her class. But I took pictures of Lily before we left, so here are those. By the way, I didn’t pose her at all. She came up with these all on her own.

I love my sweet little ballerina!