Dancin' in St. George

Sara has been taking dance for a couple of years and this year she is on a dance competition team. It's been quite an adventure. She has 5 competitions and now has completed 3 of them. Her last competition was down in St. George, so we made a really mini vacation out of it. We were planning on leaving at 10:00 Friday morning, but traveling never goes quite as planned and we had some errands to run before we could leave, so it was noon when we got on the freeway and were headed out of town. The kids did pretty good in the car. They ate snacks, played their Leapsters and just talked to each other. At one stop, Aaron picked out a giant kit kat bar for all of us to share as a treat. He didn't like the mess that it left on his hands. But Sara scarfed it down!

After we checked into our hotel we went swimming at a rec center. There was a pool at our hotel and people were swimming, but it was still a wee bit cold to me. The rec center was awesome. We'd been there before last year and had a blast. I put a life jacket on Aaron before we got in the pool and he loved how it made him float. The kiddie area was really shallow so he could walk in places but then it would get a little deeper and then the life jacket would flip him up on his back. At first that was funny to him, but soon he got frustrated and was just crying and crying about it. But he wouldn't let us take the dang jacket off of him!! That was our cue to leave. We got some yummy dinner and then headed back to the hotel for bed.The next morning it was all business. Breakfast and then get ready for dance. Sara has 2 dances for each competition. She has a jazz dance to "Who Let The Dogs Out" and a ballet to "Somewhere Over The Rainbow." It was a crazy day because they performed their first at 10:45 and then their second a half an hour later. Thirty minutes is not a lot of time to get changed and redo makeup and practice before hitting the stage again!

Sara has been having a lot of fun with dance this year. She loves performing on the stage and goofing off with the other girls between dances. In her ballet dance she gets picked up by 2 other girls and that's her favorite part. She gets a medal or trophy for participating each time and she LOVES that. They've been pretty consistent at 2nd place each time. It's such an amazing feeling to watch my little girl up there. She looks so big and independent.

After she finished dancing, we grabbed some lunch and headed to a park for a picnic. The weather was so nice. The grass was green, the trees were blossoming. Beautiful. All good things have to come to an end, so before we knew it we were back in car, heading home.