Triumphant peacock.

I am not the sort of parent who thinks her kids are the best. I tend to err on the side of underestimating them. Duchess danced her peacock dance at the Lunar New Year celebration at her school last night, and I was concerned that it would be a boring flop. She had worked on it a LOT under the tutelage of her Chinese teacher, but what I had seen looked pretty uninspiring, like a listless, jerky aerobics routine. She's not terribly graceful or coordinated, and she's really not concerned about stuff like attention to detail. (See?) But she's also a person who does stuff, as we know, and doing a solo performance (a solo DANCE performance!) is just a thing that people who do stuff... just do. She was nervous, but not terribly so, and she just took it all in stride. My concern was tempered by her casual attitude; I figured that if it was a disaster, she'd take that in stride, too, as she does with everything.

Anyway, she did her dance, all by herself, at the end of a typically boring but mildly charming bumbling-kid show, in the hot, crowded cafeteria. She did great. She didn't look nervous, though she also didn't smile or engage the audience at all. She just seemed like she had the whole thing in hand, like she was just doing it. Even a doting mom wouldn't say that she looked like a gifted or experienced dancer, but she looked like she had practiced, and she absolutely did not embarrass herself. And then her performance was over, and she was beset by friends and their parents congratulating and complimenting her, and she LOVED that. I think it might have been the best moment of her life so far.

(This, by the way, is a classmate and friend of hers. Not all of her friends are built on such a different scale from Duchess, but this is not unusual.)

(Skipper, of course, took this all as a personal affront. She was very worried that Duchess would humiliate herself, and then when it all came off well, she got really pissed that Duchess was getting so much attention. Poor kid - another lose-lose.)