expiration date 

after weeks and weeks of ballet rehearsal, including right after aina’s SCMS race, tonight was the La Bayadere performance. aina’s grandma came all the way from Jakarta to watch and show her support.

around 3-ish, we all dressed up. i bunned aina’s hair and put on her make up. and we dropped her off at the UCC’s backstage. we had to prepare her mentally for this, because she won’t be seeing us from 4pm to around 9pm, when the performance is done. 5 hours! that’s a long time!

she seemed ready though. i, on the other hand, was missing her…

after dropping her off, we all went back to Holland Village to buy some flowers from the flower shop across the street. you know the tradition: flowers for the dancers after the performance. well, what do you know: flower shops only opens half day on Sundays. we were frantically looking for other flower shops — at Holland Village Shopping Centre, Holland Village Market, even to Buona Vista MRT Station — but all the flower shops were closed.

what’s up with this half-day thing??

it turns out the two malls in Buona Vista (Star Mall and Rochester Mall) do not have any flower shops. we ran out of time, so we ended up buying a big lollipop for aina, instead. lesson learnt: next time, i’ll buy the flowers ahead of time.

we were not supposed to take pictures during the performance, but i couldn’t help it. so, i only had these taken:

aina and her friends were the flowers on the opening of La Bayadere. so they only showed up at the very beginning and the very end for the curtain bow (they even practiced the curtain bows!).

aina is the little flower girl all the way on the left, holding hands with one of the white-dressed older girl.

after the concert was done, we picked her up at the lobby and we gave her the big lollipop. she was more interested in seeing her pictures on ari’s iphone :)

but then, proud mama and grandma had to take pictures with her :)