Guest Blog: Aspire Dance Competition by Drama Queen

In typical me-fashion, I forgot that I promised to have the girls help me write this post for Mom until after they had all been sent off to bed. But I'll do my best and have them fill in the award details later...
So Friday afternoon, Scout, Crafty, Baby Doll and I all loaded into my truck with a cooler full of sandwich stuffs and made the hour and a half trip up to Ogden. We managed to hit some ugly traffic, but only two Salt Lake drivers conspired to kill us, so it could have been worse. We got there in plenty of time to check in at our hotel and then get Crafty all dolled up for her solo. At about 20 minutes before we had to be at Weber to check in, Mom sent me a text saying "Did Crafty remember her music cd? We weren't ever able to submit the music electronically, so she had to bring it on cd." Of course, sheer panic, but fortunately she had the song on her Kindle and her awesome dance teacher arranged for it to be taken to the booth and all was fine.

Crafty did an awesome job! She is a beautifully graceful dancer, and two of the three judges ranked her in a Ruby category, but the third's score was an outlier and she was disappointed to only receive a Sapphire over all. (The scoring works so: Diamond = 100-96, Ruby = 95-91, Sapphire = 90-86 Emerald= 85 and below).
Meanwhile, Princess was driving up to meet us as soon as she got off work, so we rendezvoused back at the hotel where the girls went swimming and I battled the Ogden nightlife to get us some Little Caeser's. We rounded out the night by eating Oreos and cramming onto one of the hotel beds to watch a chick flick on my computer. Then Baby Doll and I slept while Crafty helped Princess snapchat a whole slew of silly face swaps.

We had a nice slow morning of TV watching and free hotel breakfast before packing up and heading back over to the school. Scout had three dances and Crafty had five. Baby Doll and I had fun doing her hair and, since it was a dance comp, we might have let Princess put a touch of mascara on her too...  We had yummy sandwiches thanks to our well-stocked cooler and played cards while hanging out in the classroom-turned-dressing room.

About every hour or so we would have a new dance to watch. Overall, our studio got quite a few Rubies, but no diamonds, sadly. Princess had a date so she and Baby Doll headed out right after seeing the studio's biggest dance: The Willy Wonka production number. It was very cute. Of course the best part was Scout's adorable Violet Beauregard dance!

My favorite dance of them all, though, might have been the crazy 80s-inspired one that Crafty was in. Her dance teacher had gone all over the valley to thrift stores to get their costumes and showed up just a little before with a big bag of crazy bows and leg-warmers from Claires.

By the time final awards were done and all our stuff cleaned up, we didn't hit the freeway until almost 10. It was a fun weekend, and I was super proud of how grown-up these girls are getting to be. They were so professional, and even if the silly judges didn't get the memo, they are definitely both Diamonds.