A Flurry of Feet!

Whew, what a weekend.  We just finished the second weekend of performances at the dance portion of the SE MB Festival.  Both older girls performed this year, and did quite well.  Last weekend was Kaia's very first Festival performance, she was so excited to be able to wear her beautiful costume and dance on stage.  It definately made her dance lessons more enjoyable and exciting again.

Hailey danced both Saturday and Sunday this weekend.  It was tough, 2 dances each day, 4 costumes, 3 hairstyles.  Trying to get all that done, plus keeping a 5 year old interested and a 5 month old happy was definately a challenge.  I greatly appreciated my Mom's help to get everything done and get our beauties where they needed to be when they needed to be there.

The younger ones are considered "Ribbon" category, where they basically go on and are only positively critiqued and each one gets a ribbon for their participation in the performance.  It helps encourage future interest in participating in the festival.  As you can see, Kaia was very excited to get her ribbon.  Hailey is in an older group and her performances are judged and critiqued by the same adjudicator.  Her classes earned 3 High Silvers and ended it off with a Gold performance.  They've worked  diligently so far and seemed pleased with the experience.  Maybe Hailey will even want to try doing a solo or small group next year.  Good job to all the dancers!  It was nice to see so many people interested in supporting their dancers.    

Over the last 10 days I have earned a greater appreciation for having access to my laptop and wireless internet.  For as much garbage you can find on the internet, there are some good nutritional nuggets out there too, you just need to know where to look for them.  My quandry: find a more efficient way to get proper hairstyles accomplished for my girls over the last 2 weekends.

I hate to admit that I am not necessarily the most patient Mommy in the world (shocker, I'm sure).  My mission this year is to be more patient, giving, and understanding to my family.  The problem is the first thing that goes out the window when I get stressed is patience!

Unfortunately trying to create all these fancy hairdos for these events stresses me to the max, or at least it has in the past.  My girls have been blessed with full heads of thick long hair, and growing up with long thick hair myself you'd think I'd be all prepared for this.  Uh, NO.  I mean I can do pony tails, and pig tails, and the occasional braid, but I never spent this much time on my own hair in my life!  If it can't be done in 5-10 minutes, it's not worth it for me.  So now here I am, wrestling with how to achieve the perfect "curly pony tail" or french braid, and ballet buns!  Seriously it took at least an hour, hour and a half to curl Hailey's pony tail each time last year, nevermind having to "quickly" change it from a bun to a pony tail between performances.  Now with an unpredictable 5 month old, I just don't have that kind of time, nor do I want that stress.

This year I decided to "do my research" and get smarter about this endeavor.  With the help of youtube, I was able to achieve proper french braids (which I've never done before, inverted yes, proper, no), and learned about pin curls and rag/paperbag curls.  The braiding was simple enough, I've braided my hair enough in the past to figure that one out.  So, the real challenge was accomplishing the dreaded "curly pony tail".  Why don't I just use foam rollers??  Believe me, I thought of that; but her hair is too long.  We tried that last year and even after 24 hours her hair was still too damp to keep the curl and we still ended up having to blow dry her hair and curl it with the curling iron.  Not very stress free for dancer or Mommy when your trying to beat the clock and get everything done before having to load up the family and dance apparel and get to a competition an hour away!  Compounding problem, this year we needed a bun for 8am this morning, but a curly pony tail for 12:30 with keeping in mind that baby might decide they need to eat at the very same time that I need to work on the hairdo.  What to do??  Pray!

We practiced a few different things through the week, and decided to do pin curls.   What a concept, you just put gel or putty into the damp hair and curl up around your fingers and pin in place!  Let dry and voila, or so it seemed.  Like I said Hailey has very LONG hair, so it was a bit of a challenge, and the pin curls were still a little damp when I took the pins out, but the curl still held (YAY!!).  I simply left out a small top section that could cover the pin curls and when we put her hair net on to make her bun you would never know the hair underneath wasn't in a traditional bun.  Tricky :)  That left only a small amount of hair to have to curl with an iron; which then only took me about 5 minutes (another YAY!!).  The pin curls weren't perfect, but the nicer curls disguised them (bonus).  Why is this important you ask??   Almost zero stress!

This discovery allowed me to take a little time to enjoy making up my girls for their dance performances.  To get into the van on time, with all the necessary tidbits, costumes and shoes, to get to the performance rehearsals on time, with little stress to me and almost zero stress to my girls.  What a priceless thing!

I encourage you to take a little time this week to find a way to reduce your stress level.  It's good for your heart, good for your health, and good for your family!