The Cannonball's First Dance

So as you may or may not know, I happen to be the father of two girls.

Crack for little girls.

As such, I have certain duties and responsibilities that childless guys or dudes with sons simply don't.  These include, but are not limited to, struggling with ponytails, watching My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake (instead of something that doesn't make you want to kill yourself), being the male barbies whilst playing dolls with the kids (ours is, for whatever reason, named Steve Rotchie - don't ask), making pink scrambled eggs, and vetoing fashion choices so Protective Services doesn't come and take our children away.

All in a day's work, really.

As it turns out, another obligation for dads of daughters is the annual Father/Daughter Dance.  Which, I guess, has been around for quite some time.

Anyway, Kris was pretty excited about this, and took Alayna out dress-shopping for the big event, did her hair, the whole nine yards.  It was cute for about fifteen minutes - while we had our 'prom picture' taken, and she ran around with her friends, etc. - then it was two hours of kids running around shrieking in the dark to horrible, horrible pop music while a ring of dad's stood on taking copious amounts of pictures on their phones.

Check it out:

Dressed for the big date.

Arriving at her school. . .

Entrance to the dance.

They set up a few food tables so people could eat before the dance started.  Fortunately, I ate before so I didn't have to sustain myself on chicken fingers, 'salad', and macaroni and cheese.

Alayna tries her first Faygo (she sort of liked it, but she's not a huge fan of carbonation.)  Honestly, in the last seven years I haven't seen it down here once, as it's definitely a Michigan thing. . .

After eating, as the lights dimmed and they started playing music, Alayna wanted to check out what was going on in the school's library (mostly girls doing crafts and bored dads looking at their watches.)  Most of the girls at the dance were older (an by this I mean 7 or 8), so she didn't know any of them.

Fortunately a couple of her classmates showed up shortly thereafter and she began running around the 'dance floor' with them.  For the slower songs, the dads took a break from our photo-taking and 'danced,' which, for me, meant picking my kid up and slowly rotating in a circle. . .

With the low, inconsistent lighting, most of the still shots came out like crap, but the videos fared much better.  Below is one I spliced together to give you an overall impression of what the evening was like:

She spent the majority of the dance running around with a friend from her class, Violet.

After Violet and her dad took off, Alayna began to lose steam.  So after eating a second piece of cake in the art room, we decided to call it a night and take off. 

- Brian