Hip Hop Hippy

This weekend Leslie and I packed the girls into the Party planet Van (is that a thing?  A party van?  Let's make it a thing.), and headed to Austin, TX to meet our fantastic hip hop choreographer, the one and only Trevor Parmentier.  We all met at Party Planet at 9 am and had to be in Austin at 2 pm.  It's a 3 hour drive.  It's funny how, when you're 10 years old, 3 hours is a lifetime, and it requires blankets and pillows and Cupcake Wars on the Ipad and entire ice chests full of snacks....and then you get older and it's just a jaunt down the highway.  I remember when driving three hours was like losing an entire week, but we went there and back in one day!  It was a long day.

 Trevor taught them some adorable choreography...

 He even threw in some back handsprings, which they were pretty darn excited about...

 And I was pretty darn excited because he couldn't stop talking about how amazing they were.  As soon as we came in he commented on how most groups come in with "sports bras and hot shorts and barefoot" but our girls "already look(ed) so hip hop."  It made me appreciate Leslie's decision to get them all the harem pants before we went.  Let's hear it for not having to do this alone!  Also, I appreciate my own decision to get their names printed on the back of their shirts, because he never had to ask them their names.  Stroke of genius.  Or it would be if that had been my reasoning...I didn't think about it until after they were made, by hey.  My subconscious is brilliant.  My gut feelings are good.
And that's all before they even started!  Once we got going he kept telling us how awesome they are, and how surprised he was at how quickly they were picking things up.  We had scheduled 3 1/2 hours, and he said at that point he's normally scrambling to get everything finished, but they were done in 2.  He said he has never taught a group of their age so quickly.  Yeah, they're pretty great.  Now if only they would learn my choreography that fast!  So since they had extra time, they were able to break some stuff down, and work on stylizing things, and a little bit of cleaning.  Then they still had time, so they were able to talk about dance, and how he tried out for SYTYCD and did a duo with Twitch (which I cannot find a video of to save my life!), and all these other wonderful things.  I also discovered that Trevor is only 23.  Seriously?  It's so not fair.  How do all these people who are my age keep doing amazing things that I can't/haven't done?  I wish I had my own dance company, got to do a duo with Twitch, or maybe worked for Disney, or went on world tours dancing with famous people (like Lady Gaga).  That would be cool.  I mean, as Leslie pointed out, I did get married and move across the country, but still...I really should tryo out for SYTYCD....Just to say that I did.
But I digress.

Before we left, the girls gave Trevor a card that they completely covered in stickers.  I made the mistake of passing my entire sticker collection to the backseat without supervision.  Oh well.

On the way home we stopped for  celebratory pancakes and FroYoz, and I don't know what they were doing, but it involved throwing those little squishy balls of yumminess that they put on frozen yogurt at each other.  It was good.
I am so glad that we decided to go ahead and hire Trevor.  I'm glad that we decided to take the day and drive down instead of having him come to us.  It was loud, long....laborious??  haha anyway.  It was good time spent with the girls, and the dance looks great already.  I can only imagine what it will be like in a few months.
Now I just need to convince Trevor that I need to work with him and Not About Dance.  He mentioned it once...I should talk to him about it.  That would be pretty darn awesome.  Except that it's based three hours away.  But it wouldn't be all the time....Just sometimes, right?  Anyway.  It's a thought.

In the meantime, there are other thoughts to think.  Like house thoughts!
The Victorian dream has ended...It was big, and it was beautiful, and it was surrounded by oak trees that reminded me of the ranch...and it was falling down and rather outside our price range.  But hey, it was a good dream.  We also looked at some other houses, and last Thursday we actually met with the owner of one of them and spent a couple hours walking around it with Jason and Mandy and the girls and Mandy's dad, who is the president of a bank and also an electrician.  He walked us through the whole mortgage process, and got us all the paperwork to fill out.  We just filled it out this evening, and it's looking like we're going to attempt to continue that process.  It will be another big adventure, and one that's going to be a bit of a gamble...Hopefully we can do enough work on it for little enough money to be able to make something off of it when we leave.  We've been talking about new cupboards and windows, and possibly a peninsula in the kitchen, and Jesse even said that we can put hard floors and mirrors in the giant living room and let me run a tiny studio out of our house!!  How awesome would that be??  Like totally awesome.  So I'm pretty sold, just for that.

What else is there to say?

Well, I have the best job ever, where I get to make lion masks and my teachers love me so much that they give me cedarwood oil (for Jesse's beard) just because they "want to do something" for me, because I'm just that awesome.  And I tried to be a hair hippy and dye my hair with tomato juice, but it didn't do anything.  Sad Panda.  Oh well.  It was worth a shot.