Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl

I spent the evening Saturday in Denver with my friend Jane at her daughter Kiana's dance competition. I wasn't really sure what to expect but as it turned out, this was a pretty high level competition and I got to see some really fantastic performances. I took ballet and jazz for about five years when I was a little girl and even though I was OK quitting when theater started taking up too much time, I spent a lot of time feeling just a twinge jealous of all those girls on stage. I give all those years of running around in a leotard and having to know my body really well with my relatively peaceful relationship with it even now.

I ended up sleeping over and Kiana was super patient as her mother and I talked about families and parenting until two in the morning.

I met Jane and her husband Dusty back at SUU. They got married and then moved to Korea to teach english and it really wasn't until Facebook got lots of us back in touch that I knew much about what they were up to. Turns out what they were up to was being pretty killer parents and raising a bunch of adorable kids. Jane is the kind of mom that plans fabulous birthday parties and makes green milk on St. Patty's day and spend half her life driving to various lessons. But honestly that's not what consistently impresses me about her. Especially watching her this weekend as she and Kiana interacted, at the very core she absolutely adores her kids and supports the heck out of the things that are important to them. Family is wildly important to her and I admire how hard she works to create meaningful family traditions. At the same time, she went back to school last year and has done a great job retaining a sense of "Jane" amongst all that good mothering and wifing. All of that stuff still sort of scares the daylights out of me but this weekend, Jane made it look kind of effortless.

One of the studios at the competition made some pretty creative music choices and my favorite performance was to a Broken Social Scene song I have long loved.
They have a new album out today. I'm enjoying it to death right now.