Who's idea was this anyway?

A few weeks ago I was sitting outside at my friend, Jenn's and she was telling me how her twin girls had signed themselves up to dance in the 1st grade talent show and how they had only 2 days to practice for it. I laughed at her and thought to myself, "That sucks! I'm so glad my kids don't pull that stuff on me." And then less than a week later Taylor came home telling me that she had signed herself up to SING in the 3rd grade talent show. She wanted to sing What Makes You Beautiful by One Direction because that is, after all, her classes theme song this year. She tried to get her girl friends to sing it with her but they were all too embarrassed to sing in front of boys. Then she had the idea to ask a boy in her class, Mason, to sing it with her. He would have too. Except before she could ask him her group of friends decided that they wanted to DANCE to What Makes You Beautiful instead of singing to it. Tay, for whatever reason hates choreographed dancing but she agreed to do it anyway and she seemed excited about it. That was on a Thursday. The talent show was on Monday. Since it was a talent show just for the 3rd graders I didn't invest much into it. I figured they could practice at recess and call it good. Apparently the other little girl's moms had different plans:

After I got home from the boys' baseball game on Thursday evening I started getting a barrage of texts from some overly invested mother's who felt it was their duty to arrange a rehearsal time for our girls to practice the talent show. They wanted all the girls to meet on Sunday afternoon so they could "figure out what to wear and practice the routine..." What routine!? And why did what they wore that day matter? It was literally going to be a 2 minute thrown together dance by 5 drama queens who just wanted to hear their favorite song. When I informed those mothers that Sunday wouldn't work for us because we had church and we don't allow our kids to play with friends on Sunday one of the moms kind of freaked out on me via text, "but the talent show is on MONDAY!!!!! What are we going to do?" she said. Then I started to feel guilty; was I supposed to care more about how this talent show turned out? I hadn't received the memo telling me that 3rd grade talent shows are life changing events and that I needed to invest more energy into worrying about their outcome. But I was the only mother out of the other 4 moms who didn't seem to care, so maybe there was something wrong with me...

So I offered to let the girls come here to practice on Friday afternoon. That in and of itself was a headache. I literally spent all of Friday morning calling and texting moms, trying to arrange for the girls to walk home with Taylor after school and come to my house for a few hours to work on their dance. When the girls showed up they were an overly excited, giggly, bouncing mess. I wondered what I had gotten myself into. But after watching a couple Youtube clips of the music video for that song they finally had a rough draft dance put together. I have to give them props: I didn't do a darn thing to help with this dance. I just pressed play and pause when they told me to and went about eating my lunch. The girls planned the entire dance by themselves.

My mom came to the talent show with us and I immediately felt bad that she had taken an hour off of work to come. The show was kicked off by a cute girl who tried to sing It's Always A Good Time by Carly Rae Jepson. She attempted to sing it to karaoke music. She forgot most of the words and was too shy to sing very loud so all we heard was the music. I looked at my mom and her face said it all, "Is this how the whole show is going to be?" Oh no mom, it will get much worse. One kid got up and whistled two notes. One girl got up and hula hooped for 30 seconds. One boy got up and played maybe 4 chords of a song on the guitar. One kid threw five pitches to his coach. There were several botched attempts by little girls trying to be Taylor Swift. There was a dance/singing routine that turned into a little girl standing on the stage shaking her head and saying "I don't know this song." while her friend danced in circles around her. It was rough to say the least. In all fairness there were a couple of cool performances: one boy did a gymnastics routine, all the Chinese kids played the piano, and one little boy did a karate routine. Tay's dance wasn't until toward the end of the show, so by the time they all danced I felt much better knowing it wouldn't matter if they didn't do a good job. Honestly, they didn't do too bad. Especially compared to a lot of the other "talents" we saw that day. I did get it on video, but half way through the video my phone informed me that I had run out of storage space so I had to hurry and delete a bunch of stuff and then I only caught the last part of the dance.But here they are AFTER they danced in the talent show:

LiliAnna, Gloria, Aubree, Tay and Echo

Ya know, they really are a cute group of girls and I am excited to get to know them better. I found it interesting that after all the freaking out by the other moms about how the performance would turn out, none of them showed up at the talent show. I think they all work so I guess I understand. But with the way they acted leading up to the show I honestly had thought at least one or two of them would take a late lunch and come watch. It made me glad that even though I was reluctant to get involved, I was there for those girls during their practice and was there to record their performance. THAT is why I love being a stay at home mom.