Preschool Christmas Sing Along: Nope

Remember when Hannah was such a ham that she couldn't stop performing for a second to listen to her teachers give her ballet lesson?  Or how she kept dancing at Jayce's Christmas play last week?  Or how she is always singing, dancing, and performing to an imaginary crowd?

Today was not that day.

  I quickly realized that no matter what I did she wasn't going to participate in any form.  And that is when I started filming.  Her commitment to her performance as The Gloomy-Eyed Non-Singer was unshakable.
You must click through to see the video.

Hannah's preschool sing along was this morning.  I couldn't find her at first because she was seated in the corner in the front and we were in the back.  But a few people squished out of the way so that I could make my way to the side to see her, and what I discovered was a sad little girl.

She did not participate at all.  She didn't do it in a bratty way, she just didn't sing, didn't do the motions, didn't dance, didn't smile.  She looked sad, and she didn't shake it the whole performance, which luckily for her was only about twenty minutes long.  

She had to wear this snowman costume, which I think was the beginning of the end for her.  I had imagined that it was because she was hot (it was hot in there), or maybe because she was wearing a dumb (but cute) costume that covered her pretty dress, but apparently this wasn't the case.  She told me later that she didn't like the costume because she thought it was scary, but then she ended up wearing it against her will, and Hannah doesn't really like when other people have the final say on what she is wearing.  

Regardless of exactly why, she never recovered from the insult of the unwanted costume.  No smiles, no waving, no singing.  There were a few times when she was quite obviously about to burst into tears, but got distracted enough not to.  

But as soon as the play ended and someone stepped between us to block her view of me she burst into tears.  I scooped her up and she sobbed into my shoulder for the next fifteen minutes, not really wanting to be distracted or to talk to anyone.  Luckily it was the end of her school day so I took snuggled her well and then brought her home.  

And then she was fine.  She was totally fine!  

I had planned to snuggle a sad girl and feed her lunch, but instead I played with the UNO  cards with a  happy girl.  She told me the numbers, posted them in her mailbox, and made an UNO snow angel on the floor.

I'm not completely sure why the sing along was so miserable this morning, but it was memorable.  In hindsight it was kind of charming, a little like the three year old version of a baby crying on Santa's lap.  But twenty minutes after she was out of her classroom she was a happy little camper and you never would have known anything had happened at all.  My sweet little rascal.