She's a Dancer...

Last August, I signed Colleen up for her first dance class at a dance studio near my office.  Her class was on Monday's at 10 a.m., not exactly the best time for me but I wanted her to have some way to get some of her energy out.  I really wanted to put her in gymnastics since she is a monkey in disguise, but she was too young and this class had tumbling every other week along with tap and ballet.  After a few months the dance became too much on me, especially since in order to get her to dance every other week I had to take her to work with me for that first hour of the day and she got into EVERYTHING while she was there.  With tax season fast approaching I knew I couldn't do that anymore so I pulled her out at the end of October. 

In December my best friend sent me the following excerpt from a blog, not knowing I had pulled Colleen out...

Gillian Lynn – a choreographer who did Cats, and Phantom. They had lunch and he asked “how’d you get to be a dancer?” She said when I was in school, in the 30′s I was really hopeless, and the school wrote to her parents and said she has a learning disorder. Probably now they’d say she had ADHD. But this was the 30′s, and it hadn’t been invented, it wasn’t an available condition. People weren’t aware they could have that.  

So she went to see this specialist, in this oak paneled room, and she sat on her hands while this woman talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it, (she was 8), the doctor went and sat next to her, and said “I’ve listened to all the things that your mother has told me, and I need to speak with her privately, we’ll be right back.”  

As he went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. and when they got out of the room, he said, “just watch her”. Soon as they left, she was on her feet, moving to the music. He said to her mother “Mrs, Lynn, Gillian isn’t sick, she’s a dancer. take her to a dance school”.   

She did. 

“I went to this room, and it was full of people like me. People who couldn’t sit still, people who had to move, to think. They did ballet, tap, jazz, everything.”  

Then she got a wonderful career at the royal ballet, graduated, founded her own company, met Andrew Lloyd Weber, and has been responsible for some of the most amazing ballets in history...   

Someone else might have put her on medication, and told her to calm down...

After I read this I felt horrible for pulling her out because this was Colleen - the young girl that has a hard time sitting still, who loved to dance around the room, who I know is very smart and gets bored easily and could easily be classified as ADHD but I will not be medicating her even if she was; yet here I took her out of something that she could redirect some of that energy to. 

A few days later I received a call from the owner of the dance studio, asking why we pulled Colleen out.  After I explained the situation she offered to switch her to a class on Saturday.  It was at a perfect time for me; I could drop her off, work for an hour, pick her back up and continue on with my day. 

Recently I began doubting if I would sign her up for next year; she will be old enough for gymnastics and from what I have seen, she wasn't very enthusiastic about dance.  Well, that was before her dance recital yesterday.  She was so excited about dancing on the BIG stage, she was absolutely ADORABLE in her costume AND she DANCED!  She had learned how to dance despite what I had thought.  After the recital she was even teaching me and Mom how to tap to the "Hot Dog" song.  I have no idea at this point if she will ever be a great dancer, but as long as she has fun it doesn't matter.  I won't push her to continue if she don't want to but as far as next year, I will sign her up again.   She is a dancer...