4.5 hours of driving and 3 minutes of dancing

This weekend we drove north 130 miles on I-75 to Bluffton, Ohio, home of our niece Kelly and her family.  Today was the year end dance recital for Darby Elaine and we planned to be there.  We missed it last year since Max was in Las Vegas meeting Mikayla, our new granddaughter.  Now I think meeting a new beautiful granddaughter definitely qualifies as an "excused" absence from any event! Now this wasn't just any little dance recital as we soon found out.  There were 50 (yes fifty) dance numbers in the recital and Darby was in #30 and the grand finale.  So we sat through the first 25 before an intermission and then anxiously awaited Darby's group that came up at number 5 in the second half.  Darby's dance number must have lasted at least 3 minutes, but we were there to see it and then the final 20 numbers. I have a history watching a little girl dance!  Amber studied dance with a studio in Norman before we moved to Cincy- and then here in Cincy at two different studios!  And each event is unique in it's own way as it reflects the culture of that particular dance studio.  But there is nothing quite like that many little girls all dressed up and ready to dance.  So I was ready to watch our girl Darby!
This dance school certainly had a lot of students (I'm guessing over 100), mostly girls ages from barely past toddler to high school.  And as you know I like to take pictures, so I put on the telephoto zoom, adjusted my ISO up to 1600 in the dark auditorium to try to get a fast enough shutter speed so the pictures wouldn't just be blurrs.  I did get a bunch of blurry pictures, but I also got some pretty good ones that you will see later. I recommend that you stick around for the end.  If you think it's too much time you just should have been sitting in that auditorium for the 3 hours- then you'd would have a REAL appreciation of the relevance of time!
But first here are the shots of Darby that came out OK.  I wasn't going to make you wait through 30 other acts before seeing Darby.

Now if you only are interested in Darby and the Prichard family you might scroll down to the bottom of this post for the pictures of the after party! But I think looking at Don's pictures are a hoot and I highly recommend!

Darby's act was in a fairly large group.  Some of the acts involved 2-3 and some as many as 20 or so.    We didn't know any of the kids other than Darby, so all of the following pictures are perfect strangers to us, but their families were all there just like us for Darby.  And you can quit right here and not look at any of them, but some were awfully cute, and it was amazing how many different costumes there were (50 to be exact).  So here they are, all of these little girls in overdone make-up, (I might mention that Kelly put the make-up on single handedly for most of these little ones!) and at least you won't have to sit through 3 hours to see them.  This little Chicken was the first act.

These next two pictures were of one of my favorite groups.  Very young girls in tap shoes and very fancy costumes. I'm really with Don on the favorites!  The little ones!  Now it is really nice to see the talent develop at the upper levels- and some of these girls really have talent (and of course lots of hard work- which is what makes the talent look so good)- but it is the little girls that brings the ear to ear grin that just doesn't go away- you just keep on giggling after they have long left the stage!

And each these little ones seemed to be just doing their own dance

OK, for those of you who lasted to the end of these pictures, here are some after pictures of Darby and family taken after the show.  First Darby with her flowers...

And with Mom & Dad...

And the sisters and brother too...

But this was not the END. NO SIREE!  Kelly promised a grand finale to a big afternoon of dance.  We were off to the local Dairy Haus for ICE CREAM- a tradition for the Prichard Family after all dance recitals! 

I bet you wish you were there!