A trip to see the dancers on the "sub"

Part of our Christmas and Chinese New Year celebrations was a trip downtown to see the Divine Performing Arts Chinese Dancing Show. I have been wanting to take Julia for sometime and finally decided to do it the second Sunday in January. She was very excited, being the Mandarin dancer herself, so off we went for a mommy-and-me adventure downtown.

Can you see her one day in such a spectacle?

Here she is at the Finch Subway station,

I decided since she had never been on a subway we would add that to the experience. Julia was delighted to go on the "sub" as she called it - loved all the escalators taking us down, down to the underworld of the city, loved repeating the names of all the stations as she heard them on the loud speaker, loved checking out where we were on the map. She was amazed at how crowded it was - I was too for a Sunday afternoon - and that there were people with musical instruments (a woman had a cello) and pets (a seeing eye dog) and even Chinese people like her. I enjoyed seeing it all through her eyes.

Seeing the CN Tower was another highlight, and we made plans for the summer to go to the very top.

Here she is in the lobby of the theatre - lots of CNY decor to be had!

The dancing show was beautiful - the political message a bit heavy-handed - I wasn't prepared for that - but it didn't seem to phase Julia at all; she was mesmerized by the costumes and the graceful movements. She squealed when she saw that they were dancing with fans, just like she does in her class.

What I loved about the day was that it was just the two of us. I often long for the days when I was off on parental leave, and we were together all the time - hindsight makes it a rosier picture than I know it was all the time. But back then, it was so great to be so in tune with who Julia was and who she was becoming. Now things are going so fast - she's losing teeth, outgrowing her pants, dancing to hip hop - it's a big blur at times.

We often enjoy outings with other moms and their girls, and Julia in her big girl world of 6.75 years goes on her playdate adventures, but it seems rare now that she and I get to do something on our own, just the two of us - and something that doesn't involve errands. We seem to be so busy with juggling school for me, school for her, the activities, the jobs that need done - the life stuff that gets in the way of the life of being together and just being.

It was a day out of the ordinary in our otherwise ordinary lives - and a extraordinary way to reconnect.