Ready to Enjoy the Summer

The Musician's graduation party and the Dancer's dance recital have come to a successful conclusion. In a way, it was almost too much to have it on one weekend, but it was also nice to get it all over with at once.

The park where we held the graduation party had a catch-and-release pond. My niece caught her first fish, and my in-laws and some of the kids spent hours by the pond. The bubbles were also a hit with the big kids.

I think I was more melancholy about this being the Dancer's next-to-last recital than I was about the Musician graduating high school. I love watching both of my daughters perform, but I have seen the Musician in a lot more performances in marching band and concert band, than I have seen the Dancer in recitals.

The Dancer is very flexible.

Really, really flexible

The Dancer's cousin was excited that the Dancer's tap class used a song from Newsies. It's apparently one of her cousin's favorite movies.

I'm especially proud of the Dancer's progress in pointe. She's so incredibly strong, and she's put in a lot of work to become so.

Remember the foam pointe bodices I blogged about having to alter about a month ago? Yeah, it was these.

So now I'm going to settle in to blogging more, sewing more, and keeping up with the housework and what seems like perpetual sorting and tidying! What are your summer plans?

Wordless

What's In a Name?

At Ace of Spades, I saw a link showing data whereby you can supposedly tell how old a person is by his or her name. Ha!, I thought to myself. Since my mother was (for the times) much older than the norm when she had her children, I bet the average age of someone with my name is actually about 10 years older than my age. Interestingly enough, both of my sisters' names as well as my own are among the top 25 most common names of those alive as of Jan 1, 2014. And while the median age of those sharing the name Barbara is about 20 years past where I am now, the bottom of the range is indeed about 10 years past my own age. My sisters' median and bottom of range numbers are even lower, and they are both younger than I am. Does this make sense to you? It does to me simply because my parents were in general more old-fashioned than the parents of my friends, so it would make sense that the names that they found attractive would be a bit behind the fashion as well.

There's some interesting data there, if you want to check it out. For example, half of all living Brittanys are between ages 19 and 25. But a certain singer's first album only came out 15 years ago, so I don't see that being the link. Say you were 14 back in 1999, you'd only be 29 now. And I just now wondered if the name information took spelling discrepancies into account. Is Jason/Jaysun/Jayson/J-son the same name? In any case, I'm younger than my name. :)