Kyria's journal

The enrollment opened for my classes and my intermediates class was full within 6 hours. Huzzah!! Yes, I get a kick out of my students loving my classes. Some of them instructed their parents to enroll them as they were on holiday, others set an alarm clock because they were on the other side of the world.

For the beginners class we only have two people signed up, but there are two more weeks before the trial class and three more weeks after that. As long as I have five or six people to play with teach I'm happy. Teaching belly dance is one of the hardest and most fun and rewarding things in my life. I wouldn't be dancing still if I didn't teach.

Speaking of dancing, I told Sense of Bellydance that I'll take it slow this season. We have a show on October 22th and after that I'll skip most of the rehearsals. It took me a while to figure out why I am sad and happy at the same time. It's because I want to spend more time dancing. The bigger the troupe, the more time is spend on sitting around and talking. During the weekend in the cottage, we spent 7 hours on official sit down and talk business, like what we were going to do next year. I brought the costume I am working on and made a dent in adding beading. Thing is, for people who love to dance, we don't do much dancing. I hate that, I want to dance more. So I am focusing on surviving the next year and dancing as much as possible.

With regards to dancing I also scouted the local dance school that is ten minutes from our house. It is nice and they do various modern and urban dance styles, mainly for age 8-25. I am thinking of renting the studio every now and then so I can host instructors or teach a class with veils, wings or fan veils. Ideally in a couple of years it would be nice to have a group big enough to teach at their studio and go to the belly dance championships to.

Eliza is almost nine months and I have one more strip of the pill left. After finishing the strip, we'll wait and see what happens. The next twelve months will be filled with:

1. Totally rocking my weekly bellydance classes at Parnassos. I worked really hard on the lesson plans and had so much fun already. It contains stuff from Sadie's Raqs Flow, Ava's intensive from last year and various new moves I got from World Dance New York dvds. I feel like shaking things up

2. Remodeling! They start in the third week of October with demolishing our garage/shed. We will be living in our house while they are building and I am a bit worried about the lack of privacy but it's all for a good cause. The dance studio will be ready before the end of the year. We will then put all the furniture from the living room into the studio, leave the house and live somewhere else for four weeks while they work in the living room. I am currently gathering information and images for decorating the living room, dining area, play are for Eliza and the hobby area in the back of the annex. This interior design thing is fascinating though kind of confusing.

3. Getting pregnant. I have a serious case of rattling ovaries. Kind of disturbing considering that Eliza isn't sleeping through the night yet, but I love her to bits and I don't want to wait. I might get pregnant within a month, or after two years. I just don't want to wait. Plus, with the current frequency of intimacy we'll have one shot per three months so that's not helping either

4. Programming the dance studio. The builder will be done with the living room medio March/April. We'll move our furniture back into the house and have someone build sliding mirror doors on one side of the studio, plus decorate the interior as well. We'll officially open the studio in April and I want my program to be ready. I am putting quirky subjects on it that I always wanted to teach. Some costuming bits, stuff about the business side of bellydance and actual bellydance subjects but with a twist. Plus I'll schedule two prenatal bellydance workshops per month and see if there is interest in such a thing.

After getting clearance from my midwife to carry on as usual for another week, I was looking forward to doing a couple of fun things.

I asked if E could drop me off at Parnassos on Friday because I wanted to record a bit of me dancing while pregnant plus take a couple of pictures. I was planning on doing this durng the seventh month but somehow I filled the past seven weeks with sleeping, reading, prepping the house and sewing baby stuff. And don't forgetthe long walks with Noushka and E, I love the twelve o clock walk in the park. We walk for about an hour and a half with Noushka off the leash so we get to talk, afterwards I am totally knackered and need to sleep for two hours.

I took some costumes wih me and managed to video tape three improvised songs, and take a couple of pictures with the infrared remote. I am glad I got the chance to do this while I am still pregnant: that might change any day now. Ofcourse spending two hours on this totally wore me out, followed by a couple of hours of sleep.

My student/friend Sara was throwing an afternoon party on Saturday at Parnassos (the cultural center where I teach my weekly classes). I baked a cheesecake and took the bus to the city, as E had an invitation for an afternoon of hare hunting. It was nice to talk to people and watch the performance, mostly singer songwriter stuff with guitar and piano. Sara is extremely talented and joined in with several performances. Her bellydance friends did the Layla-queen of Sheba improf and I joined in as best as I could. My movements are limited but I can still hipdrop and shimmy, so that's a plus.

On Sunday E dropped me off at the Regentess theater in The Hague, for the 'tribute to oum kolthoum' concert. Six excellent Arabic mucisians, two different singers and a handful of bellydancers gave a beautiful concert. I was supposed to be one of the dancers but due to circumstances my dance friends performed our Alf Leyla performance with two other dancers instead. The second singer had a very powerful and mature voice and her renditions of Alf Leyla and Enta Omri got a lot of approval from the audience. About half of the audience as Arab, the other half was bellydancers. I got to catch up with my friends and chat, before E pickd me up around six. He went for coffee with his mother, as dogs are not allowed at the theater and as he stated, a concert without brass instruments is not his thing.

I got to talk to my friends and enjoy good music and dance performances, this was a very good weekend. It was odd when people asked me when I was due, that I could answer with 'Friday'. I enjoy my maternity leave but I would not be good at being a stay at home mom, simply because I hate it when the only adult I speak to during the day is the cashier and E, or when all I do during the day is housekeeping.

Yes, I am nesting and doing more housekeeping than usual but I still hate ironing. I try new recipies and stuff hwhich is fun, but cooking is also very time consuming with a shortlived result. I prefer costuming, more bling and a longer lasting end result.