Sunday, July 02, 2006

The Confident Smile That Says It All

What a week we've had. We're all still walking on air, Emily especially.

She has been performing at the Plowright all week and we are sooooooo proud we could burst :-))))

Last time her dance school did a show, Emily was five and exceedingly nervous. She did very well in her dances and enjoyed it, but was clearly anxious and overawed on stage (as were the rest of her group). Wow, what a difference this time round! Despite some inevitable pre-show nerves - although to be honest, I think Jon and I were more wound up than she was! - she completely beamed the whole way through it and seemed very relaxed and very, very confident in what she was doing. Emily was step and word perfect throughout and looked utterly gorgeous, but far more important than that was the wonderfully happy smile. All of the girls of course are taught to smile on stage, but for most of the younger ones there's not much smiling going on when it actually comes down to it as they're too nervous or too busy concentrating. Emily's smile was genuine, never faltered and shone out as brightly as the teenagers who've been performing for years :-))

That confidence means the world to us. She didn't even falter when things went a little awry in one show and the younger children got all mixed up at the front meaning she couldn't get into her proper place for a finale - she just moved along to a space somewhere else and got on with it - but that's just the kind of scenario that would have had her bursting into tears not so long ago. It was also significant that she stuck to her guns and performed the choreography she knew to be correct even when others in her group got slightly muddled - previously she would have assumed that she must have been doing it wrong and wouldn't have dared do something the others weren't doing, but this time she had the confidence to know she was right.

Emily absolutely loved doing this show and can't wait for the next one. Can't get over how much more confident she is than last time. Then, she clutched my hand tightly every time I had to drop her off. This time she strode off every evening to the stage door with barely a backwards glance, made her way to her group's dressing room on her own, sorted out her own hair and body glitter once there and helped some of the others get ready too.

Here she is made up and ready to leave the house on the first evening:
and here she is late last night after the final performance, with a congratulations cake:

Showbiz aside ;-) it's been a busy and eventful week. We had a powercut from 10am to 7pm on the Monday which was a complete and utter pain business-wise. Then once the power came back, our PC ended up corrupted and we couldn't send or receive any email for 48 hours. Despite two hours (I kid you not) on the phone to support, they finally washed their hands of it (naturally). We had to call out a PC repair guy finally on the Thursday, by which time we were so far behind with orders it just had to be seen to be believed. He spent an hour and half here and couldn't fix it either, so he took it away with him and brought it back on Friday, finally fixed - hurray!! Cue incredibly manic working frenzy to try to salvage what we could from nearly a week of lost business.

Emily had done lots of work this week. She enjoyed using her rhyming dictionary to write a beautiful poem about Warrior Cats; I was very impressed with that one. She also found a book called Fast Fiction on our shelves that I bought for me, years ago. It has a series of random prompts in it and you have to write a short story (or the opening to a short story) using a prompt and a five minute timer. She LOVED that and wrote half a dozen very thought provoking pieces from it including a wonderful one from "write a story about a church" in which she took on the church's personality and wrote about how it felt being used for weddings, funerals etc and how it had been destroyed during the war but then rebuilt.

Couldn't get to yoga on Tuesday because of the dress rehearsal, but we did make it to drama on Thursday afternoon, where Emily had one of the two dress rehearsals for her drama show; only one more lesson to go before the show now. We had to hot foot it back from there to get to the theatre in time, lol, I don't think I've ever applied make up so fast in my life! Mind you, the whole stage makeup thing is difficult for me as I don't wear makeup and never have (on principle). Trying to apply the distinctive eye makeup to a wriggly, excited small person when you've only got three minutes is FUN.

Emily also did some more work on her body project during the week and we looked at healthy eating again, something we've often touched on in the past. When making a chart of the fat and sugar content in some of the foods she found in the kitchen, Emily was interested to make several discoveries - for instance how misleading labelling can be. She found several things labelled low fat there were extremely high in sugar instead, and one soup that was labelled low fat and low sugar but had more fat and nearly five times as much sugar as one that didn't claim to be low in anything!! She was also highly amused to find out that coco pops were a healthier option (in terms of fat/sugar at least) than my museli :-//

Friday and yesterday we spent a lot of time in the garden. Emily made a Tutankhamun mask from modroc which turned out very nicely; I'll take a photo of it when it's painted. She also painted and varnished her sun images from midsummer solstice. Oh, and of course the obligatory paddling pool fun, although yesterday afternoon it was a relief when she wanted to come inside to watch the football as it was just simply TOO HOT. She's not too fussed that England lost, apparently (although she did make a point of going to ask someone backstage, once we'd dropped her off, what the result was, as they were still in extra time when we had to get out of the car). She wants Italy to win!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

AWWW WELL DONE EMILY XXX

Nikki said...

Thank you for the well done's :-))