Annalise at the Ballet

Yesterday, my mom and I took Annalise to her first ballet, "Sleeping Beauty." It was quite a treat for her and for the both of us. My mom even said, "I liked that so much more than I thought I would!" It was probably only the second ballet for each of us, we think. Neither of us can actually really remember. As she did when we took her to see "Annie" (her first play) the first time at age three, Annalise sat at the edge of her seat, mesmerized the whole time. She really took it all in, from the dancing to the music to the costumes and the story. We read her the synopsis ahead of time, but it took her a while to understand that the story is really secondary to the dancing. She had somewhat of a running commentary through the whole thing, which was actually pretty funny, but showed how much she really was paying attention to all the little details:
"There's not really a baby in there. I looked! There isn't!"
"Here's where the bad fairy comes in! No, that's not her."
"Here she comes! No, not yet!"
"Is this still his visualizing?"
"The king and queen don't really dance much."
"I'd like to be one of the fairies or the other dancers, but not the lilac fairy or the princess. That's too much work."
"There are 20 dancers in the group."
"Now it's time for the wedding scene!"
And my personal favorite:
"It looks like you can see his butt crack."
We had a lot of fun and I hope we can do it again sometime soon. Because Annalise is a dancer, I think it was great for her to see kind of the end result -- what she is working towards. But I think it is also important for me to expose my kids more to the arts. It's funny, because we are really a family who love art in all forms, but we have never even taken our kids to an art museum. And the only kind of concert Zachary has ever been to involves classic rock. I need to make a promise to myself to do this kind of thing more often.