Dance Camp!

Man, I have gotten be-HIND! It's only been a few weeks, but they've been busy ones! Ryan's birthday was July 16th, the next day was the stake activity (I was in charge of face painting, that could be blog worthy), the next day we went to Grandma & Grandpa Smith's for a week, then the day after that we went to Utah for a week! Whew, I was ex-HAUST-ed by the time all that was done! Now that I've had a week to recover, I guess I should get around to documenting our exciting experiences!

Today, I'm starting with the reason for our week in Kent - Barefoot Ballroom Dance Camp! The ballroom dance studio my sister Hannah is actively involved with has a class for 5-7 year olds. When we were living with them a year and a half ago, the teacher offered to let me put the boys in for half price. But I didn't feel like committing to something like that when we were hoping to sell our house and move any day. Then when we went to Hannah's concert a couple months ago I saw that they were doing a week long dance camp! The teacher said she would do buy-one-get-one for us since there were so many girls and only one boy signed up already!

I thought this would be a fun thing for the boys, I really, really did. I've watched a few scattered seasons of Dancing with the Stars, and they tend to like watching with me and grooving along (remember this?). Turns out that didn't carry over. And while Ryan was mostly well mannered and adorable, David made everyone's life a lot harder. He'd be grumpy and refuse to participate, and occasionally be rude to people. The teacher ended up making me stay part of the time (class was 3 hours long, I thought I was going to get a nice break, take Katy shopping, and have fun!), and even pick him up halfway through one day for fighting with Ryan. Now, having been a mom to boys for almost 8 years, I think the teacher (who has 3 girls) should've handled the situation differently. It sounded to me like when he got into a mood they spent too much time & energy trying to get him to participate, rather than just giving him some space. Were it an ongoing class, I would've talked to her about it, but it was so short we just tried to get through it.

Okay, that was sad to just pass over Ryan with half a sentence. He was really, really cute dancing. He occasionally got bored, but he was very good at staying on task and learning the moves. It was very adorable to watch! David is funny to watch - half cute, half awkward.

So, my camera battery charger went missing that week, so I took a bunch of pictures of the kids dancing...on my dad's camera. I'll have to get those from him eventually. For now, I have a few movies I took with my phone. These are from the day I got to stay the whole time - Wednesday. They were reviewing the 4 dances they'd learned so far. Ryan's in his new red Bakugan shirt (which he was quite mad at me for getting "too big!"), and David is in a white shirt & jean shorts. You'll notice in one of them Ryan is dancing with Adam, the male assistant. Apparently girls fighting over who gets to dance with the boys comes at a later age. :-)