Yesterday our Nugget participated in her first ever extra-curricular activity: A ballet class for three to four year olds. Y'all, my heart nearly exploded.
It was the Nugget's Schnupperstunde. A Schnupperstunde is a free trial class, but Schnupperstunde is one of those examples of a foreign word being so vastly superior that I've decided it needs to enter the English language, like Doppelgänger or Schadenfreude. A Stunde is an hour (or a session), and schnuppern means to snuffle or nose around, like a puppy in a pile of leaves, so your Schnupperstunde is where you get to sniff it out.
It smelled like roses, dude.
The studio is less than a mile from home as the crow flies, but sort of silly to reach via public transport, so I brought a stroller and the babe took a power nap as we walked over. This was great news, because she's a (big) toddler and toddlers who are tired after a full day at preschool can really bug out if you plop them in front of a group of all new people and tell them to, you know, dance.
So I was braced for everything to possibly be a trainwreck--not least because that morning Nugget had informed me that she hated dancing and didn't want to go--but it wasn't! It was a straight hour of cuteness. Right before class she woke up, ate a banana and said, "Thank you mommy for this delicious banana." I beamed.
We went inside and she told the teacher, "Hello, I am the Nugget and I am three years old." I beamed some more.
Because she doesn't yet own the standard pink outfit that the other kids have, I let her change into this horrifying tutu thing with Elsa's face on it that she loves with all of her heart. And the other kids goggled at her, so she beamed. Most importantly, her outfit gave her strength, because the branded crap kids wear somehow imbues them with the powers of the characters represented on it.
I think this is why when little kids watch TV they'll tell each other which character they are: "I'm Daniel Tiger"; "I'm Ladybug"; "I'm Cat Boy no no no no I mean Gecko". While watching Frozen, all kids are always Elsa -- I mean duh. Anna doesn't have ice powers. And then kids will Rocky Horror mime out the cartoons they are watching, too. (By the way, if you think I just made up all those characters in this last paragraph, you clearly need to get out more, you philistine.)
Also, I wonder to what degree a kid in her favorite Spiderman jammies is or is not different than a person who wears e.g. a silver picture of a saint on a chain around their neck. That's not meant condescendingly at all, by the way. Me, I buy products because famous people advertise them, and that seems like just a more abstracted form of the same impulse. On the more concrete end of things, some people kill and eat the toes of the ones they love most, or honor the greatness of slain enemies by cannibalizing them. People want to consume the people they admire, sometimes literally, in order get a little of that ineffable something extra. I bet this urge to absorb admirable others, if not physically than at least by using their lip liner, is some weird evolutionary holdover from humanity's most infinitely distant past: Once upon a time we were globby, Jabba-like cells, picking not just nutrients but also information from the bacteria we subsumed. As humans that behaviour would be pathological, so instead we try to channel others by surrounding our bodies with their trinkets.
(Did that last paragraph sound convincing, like maybe there's a straight line from the evolutionary imperative of single-celled organisms assimilating bits of genetic information from one another straight up to humans wearing religious icons? I want to be clear that I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, so #FakeNews. Get media literate people.)
Also ALSO, I wonder what would happen if I gave my kids T-shirts that had me and their dad's smiling faces printed on them --in large size, in full color--presented as if they were cooler than a Hatchimal. "Sorry, kid," I'd say. "They were all out of Elsa. But here's a dress with MY face on it!" Imagine the side-eye we'd get from other parents. Ha!
Anyway, back at ballet class the kids were taken out of the waiting and changing area into the studio and the heavy wooden door was shut in our faces for the duration, but since I was the new parent in the group I'm ashamed to say I spent a few minutes with my eyeball pressed against the keyhole, where I watched the children warm up by pretending to be the tiniest cats and the jumpiest frogs, and by golly it was effing adorable. Equally adorable is the idea that three year olds need to warm up. They are warmed up from the moment they pop out of bed at the crack of down until their bodies pull the emergency brake on their consciousnesses some time at night. I guess it's more like burning off the extra energy so they can focus for the rest of the class. By the way, I'd share pictures, but this is the Internet and those are other people's kids, and if I ever stoop to photographing strangers' children through a keyhole, I invite you to beat me about the head.
So my view was mainly of the waiting area, which had soft, colorful couches and poufs. Mid-way through the hour all the little girls thundered out of the studio because they simultaneously realized they had to pee, so that was ten minutes of unpacking and repacking them in their outfits, and like three extra minutes of all the kids un-wedgie-ing themselves. At one point this kid wandered out of class, singing to herself, suddenly realized that class wasn't over and that she'd temporarily lost her mind, shrieked and ran back in. Another one came out of the class about five times so her mom could blow her nose, equally mad at her mother each time that her nose was still running (geez, mom, you're such a d***). There was a one year old in the waiting room who grinned at me the whole time while bopping to the music emanating through the classroom door. And when it was all over, there was a bowl of small apples for the kids to take, which brought both joy and sustenance. It was perfect.
As we were leaving, I told the Nugget she did a good job listening to the teacher, and that I bet she danced well even though I couldn't see her. "What did you think about it?," I asked.
"I danced gweat," she replied. "It was much gweater dancing than I 'spected. I didn't thought so it was going to be good but it was!"
What I said was, "Mmmhmm, you didn't think it, honey. You were gReat."
But what I meant was that I was proud as punch and I hope we can go back.
It was the Nugget's Schnupperstunde. A Schnupperstunde is a free trial class, but Schnupperstunde is one of those examples of a foreign word being so vastly superior that I've decided it needs to enter the English language, like Doppelgänger or Schadenfreude. A Stunde is an hour (or a session), and schnuppern means to snuffle or nose around, like a puppy in a pile of leaves, so your Schnupperstunde is where you get to sniff it out.
It smelled like roses, dude.
The studio is less than a mile from home as the crow flies, but sort of silly to reach via public transport, so I brought a stroller and the babe took a power nap as we walked over. This was great news, because she's a (big) toddler and toddlers who are tired after a full day at preschool can really bug out if you plop them in front of a group of all new people and tell them to, you know, dance.
So I was braced for everything to possibly be a trainwreck--not least because that morning Nugget had informed me that she hated dancing and didn't want to go--but it wasn't! It was a straight hour of cuteness. Right before class she woke up, ate a banana and said, "Thank you mommy for this delicious banana." I beamed.
We went inside and she told the teacher, "Hello, I am the Nugget and I am three years old." I beamed some more.
Because she doesn't yet own the standard pink outfit that the other kids have, I let her change into this horrifying tutu thing with Elsa's face on it that she loves with all of her heart. And the other kids goggled at her, so she beamed. Most importantly, her outfit gave her strength, because the branded crap kids wear somehow imbues them with the powers of the characters represented on it.
I think this is why when little kids watch TV they'll tell each other which character they are: "I'm Daniel Tiger"; "I'm Ladybug"; "I'm Cat Boy no no no no I mean Gecko". While watching Frozen, all kids are always Elsa -- I mean duh. Anna doesn't have ice powers. And then kids will Rocky Horror mime out the cartoons they are watching, too. (By the way, if you think I just made up all those characters in this last paragraph, you clearly need to get out more, you philistine.)
Also, I wonder to what degree a kid in her favorite Spiderman jammies is or is not different than a person who wears e.g. a silver picture of a saint on a chain around their neck. That's not meant condescendingly at all, by the way. Me, I buy products because famous people advertise them, and that seems like just a more abstracted form of the same impulse. On the more concrete end of things, some people kill and eat the toes of the ones they love most, or honor the greatness of slain enemies by cannibalizing them. People want to consume the people they admire, sometimes literally, in order get a little of that ineffable something extra. I bet this urge to absorb admirable others, if not physically than at least by using their lip liner, is some weird evolutionary holdover from humanity's most infinitely distant past: Once upon a time we were globby, Jabba-like cells, picking not just nutrients but also information from the bacteria we subsumed. As humans that behaviour would be pathological, so instead we try to channel others by surrounding our bodies with their trinkets.
(Did that last paragraph sound convincing, like maybe there's a straight line from the evolutionary imperative of single-celled organisms assimilating bits of genetic information from one another straight up to humans wearing religious icons? I want to be clear that I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, so #FakeNews. Get media literate people.)
Also ALSO, I wonder what would happen if I gave my kids T-shirts that had me and their dad's smiling faces printed on them --in large size, in full color--presented as if they were cooler than a Hatchimal. "Sorry, kid," I'd say. "They were all out of Elsa. But here's a dress with MY face on it!" Imagine the side-eye we'd get from other parents. Ha!
Anyway, back at ballet class the kids were taken out of the waiting and changing area into the studio and the heavy wooden door was shut in our faces for the duration, but since I was the new parent in the group I'm ashamed to say I spent a few minutes with my eyeball pressed against the keyhole, where I watched the children warm up by pretending to be the tiniest cats and the jumpiest frogs, and by golly it was effing adorable. Equally adorable is the idea that three year olds need to warm up. They are warmed up from the moment they pop out of bed at the crack of down until their bodies pull the emergency brake on their consciousnesses some time at night. I guess it's more like burning off the extra energy so they can focus for the rest of the class. By the way, I'd share pictures, but this is the Internet and those are other people's kids, and if I ever stoop to photographing strangers' children through a keyhole, I invite you to beat me about the head.
So my view was mainly of the waiting area, which had soft, colorful couches and poufs. Mid-way through the hour all the little girls thundered out of the studio because they simultaneously realized they had to pee, so that was ten minutes of unpacking and repacking them in their outfits, and like three extra minutes of all the kids un-wedgie-ing themselves. At one point this kid wandered out of class, singing to herself, suddenly realized that class wasn't over and that she'd temporarily lost her mind, shrieked and ran back in. Another one came out of the class about five times so her mom could blow her nose, equally mad at her mother each time that her nose was still running (geez, mom, you're such a d***). There was a one year old in the waiting room who grinned at me the whole time while bopping to the music emanating through the classroom door. And when it was all over, there was a bowl of small apples for the kids to take, which brought both joy and sustenance. It was perfect.
As we were leaving, I told the Nugget she did a good job listening to the teacher, and that I bet she danced well even though I couldn't see her. "What did you think about it?," I asked.
"I danced gweat," she replied. "It was much gweater dancing than I 'spected. I didn't thought so it was going to be good but it was!"
What I said was, "Mmmhmm, you didn't think it, honey. You were gReat."
But what I meant was that I was proud as punch and I hope we can go back.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen