My Ballet Experience After More Than A Year

I’m still taking ballet classes – and they’re still kicking my butt.  But I’m loving every minute of my ballet experience!

Now that I’ve been dancing at Kingston School of Dance for more than a year, I finally feel like I’m figuring some of this ballet stuff out.  Now it finally feels more like a workout and less like a mind exercise.  I actually leave there sweaty now – like I’ve actually worked out my muscles!

All the ballet terms finally mean something to my brain, and my legs.  Okay, maybe not all the terms, and definitely not all the time, but it’s way better now.  If you’d like to read about how I felt when I started my ballet journey, here’s my post about it: I’m Taking Ballet Lessons and Loving it!

Since I’m more comfortable with all the french terms I now spend my time thinking about my turnout.  I have a terrible turnout and I’m very non-flexible.  Those two things make beautiful, graceful ballet movement a ton of work for me.  Most Monday nights I go home feeling great, mentally, but sore as the dickens by the time I sit down for the 15 minute drive home.

Often my sore body gets worse over the next 48 hours.  Maybe being on the north side of 30 and pushing myself to hold the poses, and point my toes like crazy is not the best idea.  My soreness is compounded some weeks by my next day at work.  Tuesdays are one of my standing days, so that’s a lot of time on my (sore) feet.  Although it also does give me some opportunity to stretch out those sore muscles if the day isn’t too hectic.

I still get very excited when a new person joins the class.  A few weeks ago a young lady started with us.  Of course she’s a dancer from her younger days – she did Highland dancing – but she was brand new to ballet.  It’s so fun for me to see others go through the same super steep learning curve I did.  And I must be doing something right now as a woman who hadn’t seen me dance in 6 months or so told me I had improved immensely!  That was awesome to hear!

Ebon still picks on me a lot.  Just means I still have a lot to learn.  But he also heaps on the praise when I’ve finally figured something out.  That makes me feel good.  The other dancers are awesomely supportive as well, which makes for such a great evening.  I really enjoy my dance class nights.

Being as busy as we are as a family it really rejuvenates me to go and have this night for myself.  And it’s a great way for me to try to keep my exercise level up.  I talk about my dance class a bit in my post about fitting more exercise in your busy mom life.  It’s a fun way that I get both exercise and me time, with the bonus of other adult conversations thrown in!

Now that we’re in term 2 at dance class we just found out that Emma will be dancing in 4 numbers in the recital end-of-year show.  She’s nervous about it, but I know she’ll do great.  My class doesn’t create a show piece because we’re a drop in class and the people are different each week.  There are quite a few “regulars” but we’ve all been known to miss a class here or there!

I’ve had some readers check in on me about whether I’m still dancing.  That spurred me to write this update about my ballet experience.  So thank you all for taking an interest!  If there’s something specific you’d like to you know about, contact me or leave a comment!

Do you have something in your week that you enjoy as much a I love my ballet experience?  Or do you take a ballet class?  I want to know about my readers, so please share in the comments.

~Jess