Work Plans for the Week of May 1, 2017: Ballet, a Birthday, and Britain

I rearranged our priorities last week. The kids are fondest of doing their schoolwork off and on all day--there's no push to complete their work by a specific time each day, except that I don't allow them their hour of screen time until their schoolwork is finished. They're content with this system and it works well for them, but it doesn't really always work well for ME. There's often a kid asking me for a lesson or to help with a project long after I'm longing to turn my brain off for the day--sometimes as late as 9 pm, or later, when I'm already hanging out on my bed with a glass of wine and a Captain America graphic novel.

Last week, then, to start to get a handle on the problem, I asked the kids to meet me at the school table at 10:00 (yes, they're late starters--they like to veg out until 9:00, then do animal chores and have breakfast, then Will has to make herself a cup of tea and veg out some more while she drinks it), and then to work with their best effort for three full hours, with no slacking and no breaks, and we would finish school for the day promptly at 1:00, no matter if we'd completed work plans or not. There was still some slacking and some breaks, which means that Syd didn't always finish, and realistically, I want Will to work for more like 4 hours, not 3, so she didn't always finish, either, but since my goals were to get them accustomed to working for an extended period of time and to remind them of how lovely it is to finish school and have a whole afternoon and evening of freedom, the schedule suited my purposes.

I've also had some difficulty with the kids protesting at our lessons, and inconsistently, as well. First they love food-related projects, and then they don't. First they want to study such-and-such, and then they fuss at the actual assignment. So over the weekend, as I made our lesson plans for this week, I called each kid in individually, showed her every single thing that she didn't complete last week, and asked her if she wanted to complete it this week. If she didn't, I dropped it from the schedule, because it's not worth the fight. Then I went through every single assignment that I had planned for this week, and got their buy-in on every single thing. Will, most particularly, had to be made to understand that for every lesson, I have to see some sort of output from her; she cannot simply read a text and move on with her life. This got her buy-in for some of this week's hands-on projects, when I asked her what she'd rather provide me for output and she drew a blank. It's for sure time, though, to start thinking of more self-directed studies to give her for eighth grade.

After all that, then, it was more fun than I had anticipated to drop all of our responsibilities and head out to an overnight trip that our Girl Scout council put on as a Girl Scout Leader/Daughter Appreciation Event. Staff hosted us at one of the Girl Scout camps and provided fun activities--





--and a catered dinner--



--and prizes--



--and then let us enjoy having the camp all to ourselves for the rest of the day and night:

Camp Dellwood has an amazing wildflower hike, interspersed with exercise equipment. The kids LOVED it!

It was the perfect relaxing weekend before we start a week that will end in maybe a little more relaxing, but will also contain a birthday party and a ballet recital.

Whew!

Daily work is the same this week, with both kids' buy-in: ten minutes of journaling or writing to a prompt; practice on Typing.com; reading from their MENSA reading lists; Wordly Wise 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd; a Hoffman Academy lesson or keyboard practice; and SAT prep through Khan Academy for Will. Syd will also be expected to help me with party prep every day this week, whether it's putting together the games and crafts or preparing the food or cleaning the house, AND she has hours of ballet rehearsal every night for her upcoming recital. She's going to be a busy girl!

Books of the Day consist of a couple of selections from the MENSA reading list that I have to be a little more encouraging about, a couple of non-fiction books on Ancient Greece, and a couple of things that I just thought they'd enjoy--a much more in-depth book on backyard chickens for Will, and the complete collection of Madeleine stories for Syd.

I'm not adding anything new to Memory Work this week, so it's still reviews of Platonic Solids, helping verbs, and Sonnet 116; and common prepositions, Pythagorean triples, the first eleven lines of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon, and the apostles of Jesus.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: Syd is getting close to the end of Junior Analytical Grammar, which she's pretty thrilled about, as it's not a curriculum that she's loving. Too bad for her, as it's also a curriculum that is for sure teaching her the grammar concepts that I want her to have. When she's finished Junior Analytical Grammar, I'll likely give her a month or two off, and then it's on to Analytical Grammar! Will had a mind bender on this day--she's making such short work of them that I might skip to the middle of the book for her next one.

For now, we're moving very slowly through the Middle Ages, partly because there's so much more to explore than is there in Story of the World volume 2, which I'm using as a spine mostly for the chronology, and partly because we have so much more to do than Medieval history. There's no rush, though, and the kids are loving the study, so crawling away we go! This week, we're still in chapter two of Story of the World, because the kids remain interested in the Anglo-Saxon period and there's a lot more that we can cover. On this day, we're going to learn more about the Sutton Hoo ship burial. You can request free high-resolution images of artifacts held in the British Museum, but for efficiency's sake, they've also prepared a Powerpoint slide of Sutton Hoo artifacts, and that's what I'll be showing the children. Sutton Hoo isn't the first ship burial that we've encountered (there's also one in Beowulf), so we'll be discussing ship burial and burning in a little more depth, as well, using this dissertation as my resource. The kids then have the opportunity to make their own Viking longship, if they'd like, using either this tutorial or this printable, and we can either bury it or fill a Rubbermaid bin with water and burn it--gee, I wonder which they'll choose?

The kids really like completing Junior Ranger badges by mail, so even though it's a bit of work on the weekends, finding a badge program that 1) accepts badge books by mail and 2) has badge books that can be downloaded and can be well completed using internet research, it's worth it. For this week, I found that the Juan Batista de Anza National Trail has a badge program that can be completed online--score!

After loads of research, I finally bought the Level One curriculum in modern Greek from Greek123. If you're interested, I can tell you another time how I figured out which curriculum would be best, but for now I'll just tell you that the philosophy is to learn to read and write the language the way that a native child would; you can move more quickly, of course, using the same texts and workbooks,  and once you have around a third-grade reading knowledge, you can begin to read children's books written in the language, which will improve your skills even more. To make it more fun, and because you can't take a vacation unless you've studied for it, we're doing our Greek lessons nightly as a family, all four of us squeezed around the textbook, all four of us coloring the picture of μαμὰ in our workbooks. The curriculum includes access to an online tutor, so that's what the children will be practicing with every day as part of their work plans. and as it's also very important to expose ourselves to Greek daily (remember how many words a young child needs to hear before kindergarten? That's us!), right now we're listening to a lot of Greek pop hits on Spotify, although I'm hoping to also find some good Greek programming on Youtube.

I'm hoping that Will can finish up her Budgeting badge this week--starting a badge is always the most fun, but if Girl Scouts had their way, they'd do the funnest three activities from each badge, then drop it and start the fun activities for another badge. You've always got to encourage them to finish a badge by giving them more attention for the last couple of activities and making them more fun. For Step 4 of the Budgeting badge, then, I'm encouraging Will to complete the first activity, which is to make a list of her interests, then look for non-profits that are related to that interest. This will also open her up to more possibilities for a Take Action Project for the Breathe Journey that she's working through.

Will didn't do the temperature project last week, but says that she does want to do it this week. Since she's doing that, I won't move forward with our weather unit this week.

TUESDAY: Using the decanomial square to explore binomial squares was an activity that we didn't get to last week, but both children said that they did want to do it this week... we'll see. Syd also didn't interview her friends at playgroup last week, because most of them weren't there--the end of spring semester is a busy time for everyone, even homeschoolers! Rather than try a different activity to meet the badge's requirements, Syd said that she really wanted to try again this week... we'll see. Will could possibly finish her Budgeting badge on this day, by creating a workable budget and savings plan for our upcoming vacation to Greece. At first, I thought that I'd just have her plan for her own spending money, but now I'm thinking that it would be a more valuable experience to ask her to plan a family-wide budget and savings plan. We saved a lot to be able to pay for the vacation before we booked it (we don't carry credit card balances, which is a whole other discussion for a whole other day), but we could certainly do with more money for the trip itself!

Since Will is between seasons of Analytical Grammar, she has a worksheet in her Review and Reinforcement book on Tuesday and Thursday.

WEDNESDAY: Since I want to emphasize Greece even more in our applicable studies, I've decided to pause our Story of Science unit just before our chapter on Ptolemy and use Story of the World volume 1 to cover Greek history to that point. This week, we're covering Ancient Crete, Minos, and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and Daedalus and Icarus. On this day, the kids will read/listen to the chapter, answer the quiz questions, and we'll do the mapwork directly on our travel map of Greece--when we take this map with us to Greece, the kids will have an easy reference for what happened where! I also have some Youtube videos to show them of bull jumping, the Palace at Knossos, and Crete, etc.

The kids have been oddly reluctant to complete their current Your Kids: Cooking lesson, but they both insist that they don't want to skip it. Maybe this week we'll have quiche for dinner? Normally, Syd also has a separate baking assignment just for her, and she LOVES it, but this week her baking assignment is wrapped into party prep--she's going to bake all of the components for her castle cake herself.

THURSDAY: The National Mythology Exam didn't cover Theseus, although I'm sure the kids read that chapter for fun. Nevertheless, they'll read it again on this day, and make a trading card for Theseus.

Will didn't do her Beowulf translation yesterday, but I got out some of my Old English and Middle Welsh texts this weekend to show her, and she was enthusiastic about looking at them, and claims that she does want to try the translation this week. I hope she does, as I'm really looking forward to what she comes up with!

FRIDAY: We'll probably spend a majority of the day in party prep for the next day's fairy tale-themed birthday party, but we'll set aside some time for a lesson on the futhorc, the runic language of Anglo-Saxon Britain. We'll have a lesson and look at some examples, and then the children can create a moveable alphabet of runes, if they wish. When I showed this activity to Will, she claimed that she'd be willing to do it (despite grousing about every single activity that we did last week), but Syd is more likely my sure thing.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Birthday presents. Ballet recital dress rehearsal. Birthday lunch. Party prep. Fairy tale birthday party. Sleep. Wake up. Ballet recital. Frozen yogurt afterwards, perhaps, if we're not already too sugared out from the birthday party.

What are YOUR plans for the week?

Rainbow Party Project #2: Rainbow Party Invitations, and a Wet-on-Wet Watercolor Tutorial

The rainbow party projects are going to start showing up fast and furious, with one week to go--and pouring rain coming down, which Matt says means that it DEFINITELY won't rain NEXT Saturday. Okay, sweetie...

So while the rain poured down, the kiddos and I sat down at the big wooden table in the living room and painted ourselves a summer's full of rainbows. Last night, I even dreamed about rainbows, we painted so many rainbows. I cut one huuuuuge piece of Strathmore watercolor paper into 14 4"x5" postcards, although I don't think we'll actually end up having to mail any invitations this year. Still, postcard size is a good size for an invitation.

Wet-on-wet watercolor is just a different way to watercolor, and I don't even necessarily think that the results are that better--just a little different. With wet-on-wet watercolor, the watercolor paper is also wet, and so the paint spreads more, and saturates the paper more easily, and you get that spread, saturated look that always screams "Waldorf!" to me--wet-on-wet watercolor is one of the trademarks of Steiner education.

There are different methods to achieve wet-on-wet, but when we do wet-on-wet watercolor, I give the kids a thick pad of newspaper to work on, which will absorb all the excess water produced during the activity, and then I soak the watercolor paper in a big bowl of water for several minutes, until it's completely saturated:

If you're doing this with larger pieces of watercolor paper, you'll likely need a tub, or the sink, to soak the paper in, and I can't even imagine that you'd want to do this at all with the largest pieces of paper--unless you got several people to crouch around the same piece of paper and all paint at once, a really large piece of paper would dry out before you were done with it. You can also see why you need professional artist's paper for this. It takes a nice paper to still be usable after you drown it.

After the paper is totally saturated, lift it out of the water and, depending on how big the piece is, either just shake the excess water off, like I did with these postcards, or blot the excess water off with a clean towel. The paper will still be wet, of course, but you don't want big drops of water on the surface, because that will dilute the paint.

Then, you paint...

And since these are invitations, I glued the actual invitation that Matt designed onto the back of each one, and there you have it:

A rainbow invitation to a rainbow party.

I can't wait for you to see the ridiculous dress that I'm sewing for the birthday kid to wear.

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Secondhand Sand

This weekend was all about the thrifting. Of course, we did also go to the zoo this weekend and have Father's Day and watch Toy Story 3 at the drive-in, and last weekend we had the Monroe County History Center garage sale, so that was thrifting, too...

Just go with me, here. This weekend was all about the thrifting.

First, of course, are the Friday morning garage sales. We don't often hit these, but we were on our way over to the Community Garden, anyway, and I did just happen to have a little cash money in my pocket, and that's how we ended up with a Belgian waffle maker, a Ziplock baggie full of little plastic cowboys 'n Indians, and Sydney's new best friend:

For four dollars.

But of course, we all know that there is no thrifting like the thrifting that is the Goodwill 50%-off Storewide Sale. I bought T-shirts to remake into baby bags, a sorely-needed new pair of blue jeans, subtraction flash cards for Willow + road trip, several pounds of that colored sand that you layer into jars to make shelf pretties, two dinosaur books, etc.

Sydney's mania for all things pretty has nearly driven me out of my gourd. I am SO tired of the child's refusal to wear anything but dresses and skirts and tights and leggings and hairbows and barrettes. I have to braid her hair into two pigtails and put a bow barrette at the bottom of each pigtail every morning. Every morning! All the people who are reading this and who knew me as a child--I'm talking to you, Aunt Pam!--are laughing their asses off right now. I didn't even wear make-up to my own wedding, and here I am with a house full of pigtail braids and bow barrettes.

Anyway...this was the last storewide sale until September, which means that it's time to look into the fall wardrobe. I thought about buying Sydney some practical long pants and long-sleeved shirts, and then I thought, "Aw, screw it," and ended up buying her a big stack of party dresses:

Yep, party dresses. Lace and tulle and smocking and petticoats and  puffs and velvet and ribbons:

The child now has party dresses for play clothes. Whatever, she can wear leggings and tights with them when it gets cold.

Willow has her own methods for driving me nuts, but thankfully clothing is not one of them. A while ago now she tried for a couple of months to insist on "pretty" clothes, as well, but she couldn't stick it. She basically pulls her clothing from the top of her clothing drawers, and as long as she can climb trees in it and get it muddy, she's good to go.

I actually do take pleasure in choosing the children's clothes--even digging through acres of party dresses was fun when I anticipated Sydney's joy in being presented with them, and even though Will doesn't much care about what she wears, I take a lot of pleasure in choosing clothing that is centered on what she does like--dinosaurs, horses, farms, outer space--and clothing that is centered on what I like. That's why my kid is occasionally seen wearing an AC/DC T-shirt.

Usually, however, my clothing choices look more like this:

Or perhaps this:

Five years isn't too early for a kid to dress a little skater punk, is it?

Pavophobia and Trampoline Punk: A Senior Year Trashion/Refashion Show

Once upon a time, there was a four-year-old who was super into drawing pictures of pretty outfits she'd thought up. She also like to take her mom's fabric scraps and cut and tape them into fancy clothes for her Barbies. 

One day her mom, who still got the local newspaper because it hadn't yet been sold to a conglomerate whose sole goal was to bleed its assets, saw a call for entries for the town's second annual Trashion/Refashion Show. It invited people to design their own outfits from trash and repurposed materials, and if they were accepted they'd get to model them in a runway show benefiting the local sustainable living center. It seemed like a good project for a homeschooling preschooler and her crafty mom, so the mom asked her kid if she wanted to design an outfit and help sew it and be in a real fashion show.

The kid did.

This was her design:

This is what her mom sewed:

And this is the kid getting her photo taken right before she walked the runway:

That was fourteen years ago, y'all. I don't even know how this didn't go the way of gymnastics and aerial silks and Animal Jam and horseback riding and My Little Pony and Girl Scout summer camp. But every year, leaving the theatre at the end of the Trashion/Refashion Show, the kid would be talking about what she wanted to design the next year, and then every next year when the call for entries came out, there she'd be drawing her design for me, and after the age of nine helping me sew it, and after the age of eleven sewing the whole thing, and after the age of thirteen taking over writing out and submitting her entry, too.

So somehow the years have passed until now, along with her Spring ballet recital and our Girl Scout troop's Bridging/Graduation party, this show has become another last thing for her Senior year of high school.

It's a weird feeling to be a secondary character in someone else's good old days. 

As the kids are getting properly grown up now, I've realized that these kid years are my good old days, too. So because this is also MY last Trashion/Refashion Show, or at least the last one that I'll experience this way, I asked the kid if I could go back to our roots and design and sew an outfit for her to model. She said yes, and I immediately set about discovering for myself how inadvisable it is to sew a garment for a human to wear out of a broken trampoline. 

Like, that webbing is SHARP!

This is what it looks like when the kid and I are both working on our entries on the same weekend, because we both procrastinated until the very last minute.

I ended up cutting it with the kitchen shears because I was too afraid to let any of my proper scissors near it, and tbh now I probably need a new pair of kitchen shears. The plastic threads in the cut ends of the webbing cut ME the entire time I was working with it, and they poked through all the seams and cut the kid until I covered every single inside seam with duct tape.

And there was only a certain amount of sewing I could possibly do by machine--

--before I had to just get out the hand-sewing needle and embroidery floss and resign myself to hand-stitching all the fussy parts while cutting myself up even more thoroughly.

The dog looks perturbed in the below photo, but even with all that I was happy as a clam, making a big mess in the family room in parallel with the kid making her own big mess. These ARE the good old days!

Remember that skull quilt block from November? I didn't know at the time what I was going to do with it, but I did happen to sew it from a thrifted blouse and my old wedding dress--

--which made it a refashioned item, which means that I could applique it onto the back of the trampoline webbing dress jacket. And then I cut the bodice off the wedding dress, turned it backwards so the cool fake buttons went down the front, added some spaghetti straps, and that became the dress shirt for the garment:

The trampoline webbing pants were a nightmare to sew (and a nightmare to wear, ahem, if you happen to enjoy being able to bend at the hips and knees) and I kept them super simple, but I did cut the triangle rings out of the webbing and hook them together to make a chain to add a little detail to the otherwise plain black:

And here's my Trampoline Punk!

Trampoline Punk image via Bloomington Trashion

Here's the kid's own design, Pavophobia:

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

And then one last walk down the runway together for old times' sake:

Model/Designer Walk image via Bloomington Trashion

Some of the kid's friends always come to watch her show, and afterwards I always take them all out for ice cream. Because this was also the Eclipse Weekend, though, every place was paaaaacked even at 9:30 pm on a Sunday. It was bananas! But finally we found a spot where the line at least wasn't out the door, and although they were out of waffle cones they still had one last waffle bowl left, and then a giant group left and we were all able to wedge ourselves around a little table in the back corner behind a bunch of local college students whose friends had all come to town for the eclipse:

The kids mostly talked amongst themselves but because they're nice kids and they've all known me since they were seven, they kindly included me in their conversation, as well. A year from now I'm definitely going to have to find my own friends to eat rainbow sherbet with on a certain Sunday night in mid-April, but this one last year I just enjoyed the heck out of it, like you're supposed to do in the good old days.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Sexy Coffee and Racist Tea: Weird and Troubling Nutcracker Productions

Once upon a time six years ago, there was a very tiny toy soldier bravely marching into battle under the direction of her Nutcracker General to fight off the Mouse hordes. 

Several promotions later, that child soldier has grown into an Officer, dancing her first role en pointe in our local university's production of The Nutcracker. But just between us, the Mice really have the more righteous cause. So don't tell the Nutcracker General, but his Officer will be spending half her time secretly as a Mouse, menacing that brat Clara and bravely fighting her sometimes-comrades, the soldiers. 

I think the Mice might have a real chance to win this year!

It's time, then, for my third-favorite holiday of the year: Nutcracker season! 

Here's a Fun Holiday Game For You: Find the Weirdest and Most Troubling Nutcracker Productions

If I was still working on a PhD (if only PhD programs could be twenty years long, because it took at least fifteen years before I thought of my first original research idea that would have made a good thesis, ahem. And now I get good thesis ideas on the daily!), I would 100% be writing my thesis on regional Nutcracker productions as cultural artifacts that reveal and complicate our society's understanding of gender, sexuality, and race, as well as the male gaze when directed at female-presenting adolescents. 

Particularly that last one, ahem. I thought our local university's production was a little heavy on the child predator grooming a future victim vibes, and then I watched literally any other Nutcracker ever choreographed. Most of the productions I've seen have been choreographed by men, and they seem to have a very hard time visualizing a relationship between a male and female, even one with a fifty-year age gap where the female is supposed to be, like, twelve, that's not somehow gross. 

Other Nutcracker cliches to look out for include how heteronormative and cisgender are the children's casting, costumes, props and choreography; is the "Arabian Coffee" dance meant to be "sexy" or not; and how racist does the "Chinese tea" dance present? Our local university's production is pretty racist; it was only a very few years ago that they stopped putting a Fu Manchu mustache on the male lead, recently enough that I still worry every year that it might show up again.

Here's an interesting mini-documentary about how Ballet West addressed racism in the tea dance a few years ago:

Joffrey Ballet now also does a dragon dance, and a nearby university's production invites a local martial arts school to do some sweet moves onstage during that number. 

Every November, then, in the lead-up to The Nutcracker, it's my personal mission to find the weirdest and/or most troubling productions. Partly, I just think it's interesting to see how different choreographers handle the exact same music and same basic plot. Partly, it's just me processing my sour grapes--like, sure, they make my kid dance in pants and ugly wigs every single year even when wearing that pretty party dress and having her hair in curls was her one dream and they 100% gave her height-related body dysmorphia for a while when she finally caught on that it was always the shortest girl who scored Clara, but hey, at least nobody's in blackface in OUR production! But partly, I also like to see how our various societal tropes are expressed in this one cultural commonality. You know, who's doing something different on purpose, and why? Who thought they were doing something different but it's just an even more overt expression of that same cliche? Who's tapped into a way to empower and include artists and audience, and who's actively fighting against equity and diversity?

Dutch National Ballet: The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

Many years ago during Nutcracker season, we found a Nutcracker production on YouTube that has, to date, the most bonkers plot twist imaginable: the Mice WIN the battle against the Nutcracker and take all of the child soldiers captive, including Clara's own brother, Fritz, who was commanding the toy soldier army. We were all, like, "Okay, that was weird," and moved onto the Snow Scene, after which Act 1 ends with Drosselmeyer leading Clara and the Nutcracker Prince into... his film projector, I think? There, for some reason, the Mouse King and his army appear again and this time the Nutcracker defeats him and now all the Divertissements dance while Clara and the Prince act cute and Drosselmeyer bops in and out occasionally like a matchmaking Gollum.

So we're just happily watching the Divertissements when Arabian begins with a guy cracking a whip, and then onto the stage stumble enslaved people wearing ragged clothing and chains. The male lead starts his dance, but then one of the enslaved men tries to escape and is dragged back by one leg and starts to dance this weirdly homoerotic S&M pas de deux with the Arabian lead and we all realize--OMG, that's FRITZ!!! Fritz has been sold into slavery to the Arabian dancer! He's got makeup bruises and his clothes are ripped and he's in manacles and now he's rolling around on the floor while the Arabian dancer thrusts over him and it is WILD. 

Every year since, we've tried to find this specific Nutcracker, but never ran across it again. But a couple of nights ago, in a completely hysterical fit of insomnia, I was all, "This is my mission. I will not rest until I have found this fever dream of a Nutcracker." I Googled various search terms involving Nutcracker, Fritz, and "abducted," "enslaved," and "kidnapped," etc. And finally, I cracked it! Welcome, Friends, to the Dutch National Ballet's production of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, choreographed by Toer van Schayk and Wayne Eagling. That YouTube version we watched absolutely was a bootleg of a 2011 filmed and streaming version (if your state university library has a Medici.tv subscription like mine does, you can watch it there), but at least right now you can also watch the 2021 production here. 

Also notable about this production: there's real ice skating in the Prologue and Apotheosis, Fritz tries to spy on his sister while she's changing clothes, and they skip Mother Ginger entirely.

And a random fun fact: after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Bolshoi Ballet's prima ballerina denounced the war, fled Russia, and now dances with the Dutch National Ballet.

Mariinsky Ballet: The Nutcracker

This is a fun one to watch, even before it gets super weird at the end, because the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg is famous for holding the very first production of The Nutcracker in 1892. Fun fact: audiences HATED IT! They thought, in particular, that it was so stupid to have children dancing in a professional production. Especially funny considering that child dancers are now The Nutcracker's biggest draw. The Mariinsky must have learned its lesson, because even though there are a few children's roles in this production, even Act I Masha and Fritz are played by full-grown adults acting like children. I love when they age Masha up for Act II so that she can do some proper dancing, but otherwise, full-grown adults acting alongside children while pretending to be their same age is a little Adam Sandler for my tastes.

This is the production choreographed in 2001 by Mikhail Chemiakin. At least right now, there's a 2007 production of Mariinsky Ballet's The Nutcracker available on YouTube:

Its portrayal starts off very comic and kid-friendly, with lots of funny noses and giant props and some pratfalls in Act I, and a low-key Voldemort-looking Drosselmeyer who obviously seethes with jealousy every time Masha and the Nutcracker Prince make goo-goo eyes at each other. Drosselmeyer also seems to maybe be in some kind of charge of the mice, who don't look very mouse-like and I really hope they're not actually caricatures of Jewish people. 

To get to the actual BONKERS part of the production, though, you have to hang on until the absolute last seconds of the performance, when Drosselmeyer raises a curtain to reveal that many of the characters are actually the treats in his candy shop. Masha and the Nutcracker Prince, who'd just finished up a joyful and romantic dance right before the curtain closed, are now revealed as the candy toppers on a giant wedding cake.

And y'all, crawling all over the cake and actively eating it as the curtain finally closes ARE THE MICE. THEY ARE LITERALLY GOING TO EAT MASHA AND THE PRINCE. 

My guess is that Drosselmeyer got fed up and figured hell, if he can't have Masha, might as well feed her to the mice.

Also notable about this production: the Arabian female lead is dressed in a skin-tight snakesuit and accompanied by snake puppets, and the poor Nutcracker Prince has to keep his horrifying Nutcracker mask on for an ungodly long time. There's also a DVD of a different Mariinsky Ballet Nutcracker production, originally choreographed by Vasily Vainonen in 1934, that's more wholesome than weird. Syd and I saw this in the theatre with her ballet buddies one year, and it's adorable.

New/Adventures: Nutcracker!

So, were you thinking that it might actually be easier in the long run just to traumatize your children with a terrifying Nutcracker production as young as possible so that they don't ask for expensive ballet lessons? 

Well, have I got the Nutcracker for you! 

Instead of casting children, let's cast adults who make big, childish movements and huge facial expressions in an uncanny valley version of childhood.

Instead of setting the scene in a wealthy household hosting an opulent Christmas party for all their rich friends, let's have Act I take place in an orphanage with a co-ed dormitory full of miserable adult-children. The grown men acting like little boys will also wear nightshirts that expose their legs to the upper thigh.

Instead of giving the kids dolls and drums and a random nutcracker, let's give them creepy shit like a ventriloquist's dummy and a working pistol. Fritz will literally shoot an orphan with the pistol, and the dummy will come to terrifying life just before the orphans revolt and one of them saws the head off of the headmaster, who is dressed in leather and wields some kind of stick... a riding crop, maybe?

Welcome to New/Adventure's Nutcracker!, choreographed in 1992 by Michael Bourne. It's not for children! 

Again, we watched this production several years ago on YouTube, in what must have been an excellent year for Nutcracker bootlegs, but right this second it's also available via a bootleg on Vimeo. 

If you don't watch the production with your kids, it's got some interesting moments that make it pretty fun. I can't completely figure out if it's Clara's little orphan buddy or the ventriloquist dummy who eventually is reincarnated as the Prince, but regardless, he's reincarnated shirtless, and their pas de deux would be charming and low-key sexy if the full-grown adult playing Clara didn't have to keep making those weird little kid faces and gestures. The overture to Act II that's normally danced by very little children playing angels or trees is danced by adults with wings wearing pajamas. Maybe they're dead orphans? It's also fun seeing how much sexual innuendo and camp and just plain bizarreness they can work into all of the Divertissements. 

In the end, Clara wakes back up in her orphanage, but who's hiding in her bed? Why, it's that hunky Prince again! 

Also notable about this production: Clara gets to dance blissfully with a whole troop of shirtless dudes, and she looks like she's having a fabulous time. The Arabian and Chinese dances aren't at all racist. And the Russian dance is, I think, a gay football theme?

Okay, I thought that I was going to monologue about all of my weird Nutcracker finds all in one place, but I actually have to go put a certain Mouse's hair up in milkmaid braids and then change into my black clothes for backstage and then drive her to campus for her stage rehearsal and then go chaperone the Party Scene children during dress rehearsal while my Mouse fights a battle and then check all the Party Scene kids back out to their parents and then collect my hopefully victorious Mouse and then drive us home and then eat Pizza Rolls in bed while watching hockey and then fall asleep without washing my face, so let's talk about weird Nutcrackers again later, okay?

And if you write your PhD thesis on the subject, send me a copy!

Ballet, or, All's Well that Ends

Remember Monday's post, when I told you that I had been insanely busy last week? It's because not only was I planning Syd's birthday party for that Friday (you will not be surprised to learn that Syd plans VERY elaborate birthday parties), but I'd also finally heeded the increasingly desperate mass emails from the director of Syd's ballet program and volunteered to help backstage at the dress rehearsals and the performance of the spring recital--a rendition of Coppelia, of all things.

I'd volunteered to help the littlest dancers, ages 3-7, so that I wouldn't be backstage while Syd was dancing, but wow--little kids and their parents! The kids have to be dropped off with the volunteers, as we've got background checks and the parents don't, and there are never enough volunteers, so for two hours at a time we're signing kids in, getting their costume pieces on, taking them to the bathroom, keeping them entertained, taking them to the bathroom, getting up two stories to backstage, trying not to lose them in the dark, getting them to their places, getting them back down to the dressing room without losing them, taking them to the bathroom, divesting them of their costume pieces, taking them to the bathroom, and getting them back to their parents.

And those parents! The first-time parents! The fretful parents! The confused parents! And those kids! The kids who always had to pee! The kid who kept hitting her ballet teacher in the boobs! The kid who, as we were sitting backstage, waiting for his turn to dance, turned to me and said, contemplatively, "You know, I thought that I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but I actually don't."

I explained to him that after Sunday afternoon, he could absolutely not be a ballet dancer anymore, if he so chose, but right now, he was 100% a ballet dancer, so scoot out onto that stage, Buddy!

And while we're on the subject, let's just pause right here to give a special shout-out to the parents who brought a tray of sticky chocolate candies as a "treat" for the small children on recital day.

The small children who wear white leotards with white skirts. Half of them are probably allergic to whatever is in the candy. The other half probably aren't allowed to have sugar.

I'm not even ashamed to tell you that those treats?

I hid them behind the piano.

Anyway, although it was an adventure and I was glad to be backstage in Syd's world for a bit, I did not expect how utterly exhausted and brain-dead I would be after corralling small children and handling their parents every night, and that is why the thing that I am about to tell you about happened.

It was Thursday evening. Syd and I had been in ballet rehearsal since 5:30, and we were finally done at 8:30. We drove home, discussing along the way what still needed to be done for her birthday party the next evening (short answer: everything). As I pulled into the driveway at 8:57, I noted that all the lights in the house were off, and thought, "Huh. Where's Willow?"

And then I remembered. She was at the library. Which closes at 9:00. A twenty-minute drive from here. And I WAS SUPPOSED TO PICK HER UP.

I'd dropped her off with Matt at 5:00, for him to take to horseback riding, and he was going to let her go to the library after that while he did some last-minute party shopping, and I was going to pick her up after ballet rehearsal, since I drove right by the library on the way home!

Oh, and my phone is basically non-functioning.

I debated peeling out and racing for the library right then, but instead decided to race inside first, to my computer, and message my friend who's always online. She immediately replied that she'd call Matt for me, and that she, too, would race for the library, since she lives closer than I do. That done, I bolted back to the car and DID peel out, and sped at a shocking speed back into town. Frankly, I was hoping that a police car would pull me over, so that I could explain where my kid was and get them to send a patrol car over to the library.

Would you like to know what was going through my mind as I drove back to the library? Here are a few topics: We live in a college town, so every now and then a young woman goes missing and/or is murdered. Could Will outrun a murderer? No. We live in a college town, so every now and then a young man rapes a young woman. Could Will outrun a rapist? No. Or perhaps a librarian discovered her before a murderer/rapist could. Would they call the police and tell them that someone had abandoned their child? Would the police give her back to me if they did so? Damn it, when I told Will the name of my friend who's a foster parent, and instructed her to have that person called to come get her if she was ever snatched by Social Services, I'd been kidding! But at least then she wouldn't be murdered!

I ended up tearing into the parking lot just behind the minivan driven by my friend. We both threw open our car doors, called out for Will, and then that very kid, who was kicked back casually against the limestone wall of the library, next to the door, a stack of books at her feet, looked up from the book she'd been reading and was all like, "Oh, hey!"

Not. Fussed. At. All.

As I forcibly embraced Will, who was frowning because I had lost her place in her book, and began to thank my friend, a SECOND friend came peeling up. My first friend had thought to call her because this second friend drives Uber and was possibly downtown. I thanked them all very sincerely, and then took my kid back home, occasionally reaching behind my seat to clutch her leg and make sure that she was still there.

I asked Will, "What would you have done if it had been a long time later and I still hadn't shown up?"

She replied, "I had six books with me. Someone would have remembered me eventually."

I don't doubt this is true. But I don't *think* that I was overreacting. I mean, right? Although she is almost twelve. Can twelve-year-olds hang out alone? I haven't thought about it. If we'd still been living in our old neighborhood, I'd have been letting her walk alone to the library and back for over a year now. But loitering in an empty parking lot is totally different from moving with purpose down a sidewalk. BUT when I was twelve, I definitely remember loitering in empty parking lots with my friends. But *I* didn't have enough supervision.

But clearly neither does she...

Regardless, from now on when I'm busy and distracted AND have to pick a kid up from somewhere, I'm writing myself a note on my hand!

Fortunately, there were no more forgotten kids for the entire rest of the week. No kids were lost at Syd's birthday party, which went really, really, REALLY well, and no kids were lost during the ballet recital, although I did have to hold the hands of a couple of children and walk them onto the stage, because as soon as they caught sight of the audience, they basically began backing against my knees, saying, "No, no, no, no!" I was all, "Nope! Too late now!" and towed them onstage.

They were fine.

And here's my own little dancer!

Sneaky action photography in a darkened auditorium is hard, yo!

After the recital, it's become my tradition to have a photo shoot on campus, mostly of the ballet dancer, because she's the one who likes it the most, but I'll also snap as many pictures as I can of anyone else who'll let me.

This one let me a little bit.

But mostly it was this one who wanted to be photographed.

I'm dressed like a stage hand, not a bank robber!

Matt snapped this photo. It's pretty typical--all of us with our mouths open, talking at the same time, and one of us frowning and possibly about to throw a fit.

I keep expecting the ballet director to finally realize that MY child is clearly the most talented and special child in the program.

I mean obviously, right?

I know very little about ballet, but even I can see how deeply talented she is!

Don't tell anyone that I said so, but she's also the cutest one in the program.

All right, we'll let Matt get in some photos, too!

When I wrote the title of this post, I thought that ballet had ended for the year, but now I hear that Syd actually wants to do the Summer Intensive session, as well...

Look for another set of post-performance portraits in a month or so, I guess!