matching tracksuits

L has been dancing whenever she hears music from the time she could stand. At first, it was only rhythmic bouncing with her knees and upper body. As her motor control improved, so did her moves.

So great is her love of motion that she’ll gladly sit and watch others dance. One of her favorite videos to watch is a clip about one young English lady’s ballet instruction, and from the first time she watched, she declared, “I’m a ballerina!”

Now, at close to four years old, she’s finally of the age that we can actually begin to make that reality.

A quick trip to the ballet supply store, a few phone calls, and we have a reluctant ballerina.

L is a cautious girl: she doesn’t just dive into this or that without concern. She is, in short, a worrier. And so on the first day of ballet, though she had been talking about it all week, she fretted that she might not like it after all.

Fear set in, and before long, she was declaring, “I don’t want to go.” No amount of cajoling could convince her.

The Opportunities-We-Never-Had dilemma set in: we never want to force her to participate in anything creative — where’s the joy in that? Yet we knew that if we could just get her there, just let her see the other girls dancing, that all would be well.

Finally, K simply declared that in order to cancel the lessons, L herself had to go with Mama to  cancel the lessons.

She ended up staying.

Saturday morning, before her second lesson, L was all smiles.

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In the first installment of the Toy Story series, Woody, thinking he’s been left behind, falls to the ground and decries his new, depressing status: “I’m a lost toy!”

Surely there can be many things more terrifying than being lost. One of our great childhood fears is getting lost, being separated from our parents and unable to find them. It’s the stuff of every child’s nightmares, and in a modified way, the plot of great books of the past.

Losing something dear to us is like losing a part of us.

Today, before Mass, somewhere between getting out of the car and walking out of the restroom, L lost her Madeline doll. “She may be teeny tiny, diminutive, petite.” L’s Madeline doll was all those things, and she even had a scar from having her appendectomy.

I walked back to the car, looking for the doll that I thought surely would be easy to find. No such luck. K and L went back to the restroom. No doll. After Mass, I talked to the ushers. Sadly, there’s no lost and found bin anymore, but they informed me that people often leave lost items on the tables outside the sanctuary. No Madeline. We checked the bathroom once more and looked carefully as we went back to the car.

No luck; no Madeline.

Fortunately, L was not terribly attached to the dolls, so a few tears and it was all fine.

But I’m genuinely curious about what happened to that doll. Did someone take it? If so, why? Isn’t it obviously a lost toy? If someone found it in the parking lot, isn’t it a reasonable assumption that the owner will return to look for it? In short, who would simply take a toy when it’s obvious where the owner is? Who would take a doll from a church parking lot?

Perhaps it will show up next week. There’s always that hope — the idealism that led me to be a teacher still says, “Someone will play with it for a week, then return it.”

Instructions

1. Scrub.

2. Rinse.

3. Scrub again.

But be wary of the dog, just waiting to steal your brush.

We thought about going to the beach today. None of us really wanted to — well, none of us who would have been doing the driving and paying. We ended up going to the park for some bike riding:

And then to McDonald’s for shakes and a televised softball game:

We all felt thoroughly red, white, and blue.