I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.....the dance.  I am disgruntled with the dance.  I love seeing Sara enjoy herself.  I love seeing her after all of the work is done.  But I absolutely detest and loathe getting her ready for a dance recital.

Today we had the dress rehearsal for the Christmas Recital tomorrow.  The dress rehearsal is at a nursing home.  Great.  Two of my *favorite* things in one place.  The dance and nursing homes.  The smell of hairspray and urine just flips my frickin' lid.  (The lesser PMSing side of Christina would like to express, that she thinks its a sweet idea to have the rehearsal at the nursing home.  I get a little weepy at the sparkling smiles from the octogenarians.)

I'm never on time to these things.  I woke up 3 hours early to get there by 9:45a.m.  I fed everyone breakfast and even did a little laundry.  I even had an entire hour scheduled out to deal with hair! It went a little something like this....

8:00a.m.  "Sara where's your tights?"  Found them with a GIANT runner down the leg.  Found last years tights and threw in the washer.

8:20a.m.  Start the hair.  Brush it out to the sounds of her wailing and screaming like I'm ripping her fingernails out.  Subconsciously thinking of cutting all of her hair off.  Hermione looks cute now, right?  Pull into a pony tail.  Bobby pin and hair spray a million fly away hairs into place.  Decide which looks worse?  A thousand pins or fly away hair?  Remove most of the pins and hair spray the crap out of it.  Twist pony tail into a bun and pin the crap out of it, to get it to stay in place.  Attach "fake hair".  (I am so mad at myself for this purchase.  It doesn't even match her natural hair color, but unless you're standing right next to her you can't tell.  And if you're going to judge me on the color of my child's fake hair then you can go....F) Hair is done.  Crap.  She's in a t-shirt.  Contemplate cutting the t-shirt off of her????

8:40a.m.  Cooper has now "downloaded" into his diaper big time and has hidden the wet wipes.  Spend 10 minutes trying to find wet wipes, changing his diaper, cleaning his hands because he wanted to "help".
8:50a.m. - 8:55 am.  Waiting for tights to dry.  They're only tights right, this shouldn't take too long.  Screw it.  I'll blow dry them.

9:00a.m  Tights on but she's whining because they're "wet".  I explain they're "damp", if she would like to know what wet tights really feel like, I could show her.  Have you ever done the splits on a wet football field?  Or peed on yourself during the high kick routine because you didn't have time to go to the restroom before half time? That's wet tights sister.

Costume on.  Here's the problem.  My Sara is tall.  She has long legs and a long torso.  Her costume was designed to fit someone about two inches shorter than her.  The top of it hit right at her "chi chi" level.  If she moved any it would move down and her chi chi's were out.  Poor girl.  I yanked and pulled and wedgied and pinned that stupid costume to spare her the nick name Janet Jackson.  Done.

 Balls!!  Why is the Mystery Machine on her arm!!  How in blue blazes am I going to get that OFF!!  Found box of alcohol pads I've had since doing the girls IVF cycle.  Luckily they weren't dried out and I was able to scrub off Scooby and the Gang, but left a giant red splotch.

Make Up and I've lost all complete sense of time.  Putting make up on her perfect skin feels like a crime.  Who cares if it looks good on stage?!  I think innocence and natural are far better.   Stupid  blood red lipstick is broke in half.  I don't have a lip brush.  How the crap am I going to do this?  It goes on messily and I use an alcohol pad make it look somewhat correctly applied and to not look like she applied it herself.

Herd the worms into the car and of course it's out of gas.  Of course at the gas station all of the pumps are full and I get behind the woman who is just sitting there.  She's not pumping.  She's just sitting there in her car.  Looking around.  I am very successful to suppress the slur of explicatives I want to spew but feel they would ruin the feel of the car as Emily and Sara are singing Jingle Bells in the back seat.  That's not festive talk.  Sputter down the road on fumes to the next gas station.

We make it to the rehearsal with 1 minute to spare.  Hurry up and wait because we're number 16.  Oh joy, and I get to do it all again tomorrow.