Been Feis-ing

A feis (pronounced fesh) is an Irish dance competition. Imagine a hotel ballroom with five stages (dance floors, actually) set up along one side, nervous dancers wearing expensive dresses and sausage curl wigs, crying babies, bored siblings and parents. Okay, it's not that bad. But when you have two dancers who compete at different times and you're there all day long, you start to wonder what in the world you're doing.

But then you see the kidlets smile. You see the confidence they gain from dancing in front of all those people. You see them learning to be good sports when they don't place. You see the pride when they place in a dance and realize they'll be moving up to a new level. (There are six levels of competitions: Beginner, Adv. Beginner, Novice, Prizewinner, Prelim. Champion, Open Champion.)

The kidlets love Irish dancing. Hubby grew up in Long Island where girls did this. My maiden name is Martinez and I grew up not even knowing it existed until seeing Riverdance in London in 1996.

I'm learning though. I've come to the realization we are now an Irish Dance family. We're at the dance studio two nights a week (three until the Oireachtas aka Western Regionals.) The kids are singing Gaelic songs. The baby can't wait until she's old enough to start (next fall actually) and sat through a class a couple of weeks ago without moving or making any noise.

Slan go foill!