Monday, April 21, 2008

On Stage


I had some photos of the little lady printed today. I have a cousin in California who wanted hard copies of her recent photos to be sent tomorrow through snail mail, so I had them printed the last minute in a nearby digital shop.

Truly living in the digital age, I have gigabytes of her photos accumulated through the years. I stopped having them printed after her 4th birthday. I figured, I can store them in the computer anyways, and I will just have all of them in one batch printing in the near future (as in, when is that exactly again?).

So they piled up, month after month, occupying a lot of disk space in the hard drive. Although I always remind myself to back up, the only one that I have created is a DVD (4.7 GB) back up out of all the photos. Hopefully, my PC won't crash one of these days. Knock on wood!

These photos were taken during the recent culminating activity I was talking about in another post. She performed twice that day; first, as part of the Grade 1 class, singing and dancing to The Sound of Music's "Getting to know you", and second, the ballet dance recital.


It was great to see her on stage! Even greater, when I saw how she loved performing in front of a big audience. The $125 ballet dance lessons paid off after all! Not because she danced perfectly that day, but because of the happiness, enthusiasm and passion I saw through her eyes when she danced. What I saw that day was priceless.

Personally, I did not like her to take ballet lessons. It was not a career I imagine her pursuing in the future. I was more willing to pay for art and voice lessons, maybe because I was more inclined to them. But when the school offered the course, she wanted so much to take it so I gave in.

After having read tons of parenting books when I was still a new mother, one of the lessons I learned in order to raise a happy and well-rounded child, is to support the child's interests and motivate him/her to pursue them.

Although the little lady has the same passion for art, music and writing as I do, I noticed that she has a lot of other interests too, that she has developed entirely on her own.

One of which, is her love for plants and flowers. She has a green thumb, and I don't. Every now and then, she picks the most beautiful flowers in our garden and gives it to me and to other people in the house as a surprise. She tapes the stem to a card with her "I love you! Mwah!" note along with a nice drawing.

I realized that young as she may be, she has already become her own unique person. Eventually when she grows up, the dominant passion that she has will emerge to be the path that she will be pursuing later on. And whatever that may be, one thing is for sure - I will be there to support and guide her towards its realization.

I still want her to be an artist-model-fashion designer-singer-writer-journalist
rolled into one. But then again, that is just me hoping that she will be the best that she can be by making the most of what she has. :)

Did I mention that she got 3 medals/awards that day? What a very nice surprise to end the program!