May 5th, 2010

Feliz Cinco de Mayo, everybody!

I just went to watch Isabel perform in a presentation for Mother’s Day that her class did.  It was the most adorable thing I have ever seen in my life.

First of all, I knew my daughter was the smallest in her class, but I didn’t realize by how much.  Her birthday is in December, and by the calculations of the Czech school system and most Czech parents, she should not have started until this upcoming September.  However, my wife was anxious to start her new job and get back into the mainstream of real life, we begged the school and they eventually relented.  So, she’s the youngest in her preschool class and you can add to that that she is not genetically predestined for extreme height.  Neither my wife or myself are particularly tall.  Still, she is a head shorter than the next shortest and there are two girls in the class that are nearly twice as tall as she is.  Literally.

So, that was very cute and all of the kids were standing in a semi-circle facing the parents and they were all holding hands and they were all extremely cute kids, there was one girl who seemed to be a bit uncomfortable in her dress but for the most part they were also a well disciplined group, like an experienced troupe of veteran performers.

Various kids came out of the group, one by one, to do their solo performances.  Nobody flubbed their lines, none of the other kids were poking them in the back, and the recitals were short and sweet.  I was worried that Isabel would have to do that, if everybody did it, and I was nervous for her, but in the end only a little over half the kids had individual parts, so she was spared that – until next  year.

There were parents with cameras, there was a baby crying in the audience, it was all very cliché.

The biggest difference, for me, between this and a similar event at an American school, was just that I didn’t understand all the words to all the songs, but it didn’t matter.

Cute little kids are cute in any language.