Starring Mia - As Herself

Picture this: A thirty pound preschooler with sweet piggy-tails, standing on the front row at the VBS program. Place a small group of well-behaved children around and behind her who are doing their best to sing the correct words and make the correct hand motions.

Now, bend her down 90 degrees at the waist, airplane her arms out from both sides, and tilt her head straight up to look at the audience. Now make her dance. Make her arms twist in semi-circles around her stationary body, and make her bounce to her own rhythm. Knock her knees together. Open her mouth and stick out her tongue, widen her eyes and wiggle her brows.

Got it?

That was my daughter at her first VBS program last weekend. Completely off the wall in her hammy behavior, not one word of one song was sung by Mia. Not one choreographed hand motion was executed by her.

It was stinkin' adorable. From a strictly non-partial viewpoint.

Let me back up and say that she'd been singing these songs at home all week and moving in what I assume were the correct motions to go along with the music. She totally knew some of what she was supposed to do. Being 3, I didn't expect her to know all of it, but I also didn't expect her to be quite so unabashedly enthusiastic in making up HER OWN program.

I think she would have done at least a little bit of the program as instructed, had I not been on the front row with a video camera. She took one look in my direction, and whipped out her best Dora/Barney dance moves.

You see, Mia LOVES to watch herself on the video camera. We can sit her down with an old recording of herself, and she'll laugh her socks off at her own antics. She'll recite the lines, knowing the scenes by heart. She has occasionally (somehow) recruited her sophisticated mother for reenactments of some of her favorite moments. If I stretch veeeerrry far, I can even pretend we're doing an intelligence-boosting activity when we begin these staged performances.

So I'm pretty sure she saw the video camera at Friday night's program and was so excited about having a new video of herself to watch and re-perform, that she forgot what she was supposed to be performing in the first place.

This week she'll be singing and dancing her way through some very spirited reenactments of herself. However, if she asks (ahem, directs) me to dance like she did, I'll have to plead laundry duty. I'm not sure I could survive that level of spinning.