My Little Dancer

Finally, finally, finally. Jay is finally taking dance classes at a nice school nearby. I say finally because my baby girl has been gyrating to Beyonce since she was a year and a half old, for real. She saw B on a Grammy performance in 2003 and the rest, as they say, is history. So since then I have wanted to encourage that love for dance by putting her in dance. It's such great exercise, she's so good at it and she loves doing it. If you have a combination like that you can't ignore it.

But...Jay is 6 years old and has to take the same prerequisite class all the kids take. Do you know what that means? It's pretty much a baby class. They focus on the earliest stages of ballet and tap and dance to How Much is the Doggie in the Window and just tap their feet when in tap shoes.

"You've got to be kidding me," was my thought when I saw her dancing.

Now, I'm smart enough to know that you have to start somewhere, even if you could perform alongside Beyonce and look good (me biased? never), so I encourage Jay to take these seven classes then she'll be in class with kids her age in August. Don't get me wrong, Jay says she enjoys the classes, which tells me she's still a kid and enjoys that fact, but I don't want her to get discouraged whilst dancing to preschool songs. But I think that's just the worried mom in me.

Still, I can't even sit through an entire class while she's learning the steps with the other girls and spinning a parachute around in circles the way we did in our first Gymboree class when she was about a year old. It literally pains me to see her get dressed to be at dance class by
9:20 a.m., to flit around the way she will with girls who are about three and four years old.

If you know Jay, she can rock it. She let's the music become the background to her self-expression and she has never chosen a preschool song to rock it out to. But, it's a good start. She'll go on to ballet and we'll likely allow her to take Hip-Hop just so she can get some of that self-expression out. You can't express yourself as a ballerina when your first teacher was a fiery-hot, booty shakin' diva like Miss Beyonce. But knowing Jay, in time, she'll find a way.