Dancing queen

Ava started taking a dance class on Tuesdays after school a few weeks ago. I thought it would be good to have her do something extracurricular in Swedish so she can understand what it's like for her friends at school whose native language is not English. Believe me, I know that the fact we are enrolling her in a class so she can hear Swedish WHILE LIVING IN SWEDEN in strange. That's because Sweden is like the Expat Twilight Zone where you could very feasibly live for years and not learn Swedish and be just fine. MANY people do just that. One woman, who shall remain nameless, has lived in Sweden for nearly 5 years and told me that whenever someone in a shop speaks to her British husband in Swedish, he knocks on the table and says "English, English." I think we're destined to be great friends with them. Not.

At any rate, Ava is really enjoying dance class, which seems to involve lots of "jazz hands" and marching around. I think the main reasons she likes it are because she gets to wear a "dance dress" and "dance shoes" and because the class is for 4- and 5-year-olds only and she's quite pleased about being 4 (and as an aside can I just say that having a conversation 5 times a day about how old you are, were, and will be can push a woman to the limits of sanity). Here's Miss 4 at class on Tuesday:
I like the dance class because it is remarkably cheap ($90 for 12 classes - hunh?), is close to school, and, get this, has a very cozy cafe/bar/restaurant downstairs (Cafe Hängmattan) that has plenty of room for a 2-year-old to run around while waiting for his big sister to finish class. Adrian came with us on Tuesday and agreed that the whole thing was suitably civilized: