An adventurous evening of cereal throwing and hip dropping

Yesterday was yet another installment in our crazy evenings of late. I had to pick up both children from separate locations, get them home and unpacked, find something (snorts) for dinner, clean up, feed Anne, do general children and house control, and get ready for a belly dance performance, all in a 2 hour time span.

We start our adventures as me and the kids arrive home. Mike was still at work, so I unpacked the bags and got Hank set up watching a quick tv show with Anne in the bouncy seat so that I could have my hands free. She's much less willing to suck on her bouncy seat dangling toys in the evening, so I heard wailing much sooner than usual. I got her nursed as Mike arrived home.

We slapped some leftovers together and sat down to eat while Anne played on the floor. As Mike cleaned up, I got Anne's rice cereal ready. There was one unfortunate moment in which I noticed that Anne was *licking* the floor and Henry was wiping something up (WHAT DID HE SPILL?!), but I quickly got Anne settled into her highchair. Many flung cereal clumps into hair later, Anne was fed and Mike was giving Hank a bath. I played with Anne for a bit, and then took Anne with me to get dressed into my costume. She seemed to like the sparkle factor.

At 7 pm, I was on my way to the studio for a last minute run through and was feeling surprisingly un-nervous. I've performed before, so I thought maybe I was just getting used to it. We had a bit of an adventure in the car on the way to the performance involving someones bra being on upside down, and so we arrived laughing and in good spirits. And then we went inside.

There were a TON of people there. It was an event for a local hospital honoring women, so it was mostly females in attendance, but still, there was a LOT of them. And at that point, I felt nervous. The last time we'd done a public performance, I was 8 months pregnant and we were at a college event in which the small gathered crowd of students looked like they were much more interested in studying their cuticles than in watching us dance. This was another story altogether. And we were the only dancers, so everyone was looking at us in our coverups with abject curiosity.

We nervously sweated out in the hallway until they were ready for us. When it was time, we paraded in and distracted ourselves by taking off our coverups and lining up. Claire introduced us, and we lined up for our first dance. We start facing the back, and when we turned around I saw that the GIGANTIC crowd was all crowded around our teeny tiny dance floor and all were paying attention and watching us. This is the first time this has ever happened. I mean, everyone actually got out of their seats to come stand closer to the stage to watch us. It made me happy that they were so interested. Until my problem began.

My problem being that as I danced, I could feel my very heavy, bead-laden skirt slowly start to slip down. Claire always tells us "if you feel it slipping, yank it up!" and she's right, because although that isn't ideal, the alternative is so, SO much worse. So I did, at as discreet an interval as I could. I waited until I was in the back, or everyone was distracted by someones solo part, and hopefully I pulled it off ok. But, as you can imagine, the whole situation was *very* distracting for me. I need to sew something inside the skirt to keep it up better. Previously, I was pregnant every single time I danced in my green costume with more to hold it up. :)

At any rate, we finished with my skirt still on my body, so that's good. The crowd was very enthusiastic when we finished. Perhaps they had had wine. But all in all, it went very well, and we all left happy.

I just love those girls.