One year, my mom was staying with my grandma who was in the hospital and she didn't make it back for the ballet, so Joe went with me. He spent the evening figuring out which holiday commercials he remembered different parts of the Nutcracker Suite from.
We haven't gone the past few years, but this year we decided it was time to take Caroline. My mom has a memory of taking me at age 2. But in retrospect, we're not sure I wasn't maybe three or four.
Caroline was very excited to travel alone in the car with us, all dressed up in her "pretty dress" and her "kitty shoes". When we got to the Opera House, she was given a teddy bear by the Ballet staff and we went to the lobby to see the big tree. Caroline wanted to go up the upholstered steps to the orchestra level to see what it looked like, and she was very impressed by the pretty ceiling.
Then it was up in the big elevator to the very top level - we had gotten tickets in the back row of the Balcony Circle. We got settled into our seats and Caroline checked out the big chandelier, decided it was a water fall, and started making fish faces at me.
As the lights went down, she got very excited. Sadly (for the people around us), Caroline does not have an "inside voice". We told her she needed to whisper and she seemed to understand, putting her finger to her lips and saying, "Shhhh...", but then she immediately followed it up with a loud, "OK, Mommy! SHHH!" She narrated the opening acts, yelling out, "Look, Mommy!", "Dancing - where's Anna?" (her name for Angelina Ballerina), "Ooh! Kissmass Tee!", "Dancing!", "Look, Mommy, Drums!" And when Clara's brother and the other boys rush in with their drums and trumpets to break up the girls' party, she yelled, "Oh no! Bad boy!" We didn't quite make it to the part when Clara falls asleep and the tree grows before I decided we should slip outside for a little early intermission.
Because it was Opening Night, there were "treat tables" with sugar cookies and juice, so Caroline got a chance to dance around the empty upstairs lobby, stuff her face with cookies, run up and down the stairs, and even drink from the water fountain.
We tried again for Act II, but didn't even make it past the Spanish Chocolate in the Sugar Plum Fairy's celebration before Caroline asked to go back outside. The program vendor had given her a box of crayons, and we grabbed some tickets and our ticket envelope, the crayons, and went outside to sit on the floor and color for a while.
While we were out there, we bumped into another mom with a squirmy three year old. The ushers had told her there was a tv showing the performance down on the Mezzanine Level, so the four of us went down to the bar on the Mezzanine and sat at the end watching the Grand Pas de Deux while the girls shared the crayons and drank from the cups of water the bartender gave us (well, the other girl drank from the cup, Caroline poured water down the front of her dress, the table, and all over the floor).
At the end of the pas de deux, we caught the elevator for a ride back up to the balcony to meet Grandma and then we slipped back out quickly, beating most of the traffic, and somehow got Caroline down to sleep by 10pm.
The boys had been a little concerned that Caroline wasn't around for pizza night with Daddy, and Max seems to have waited up for her to come to bed. When I snuck into the room to put her down, he sighed, "Care-line!" and then slumped back down into his bed. She cried for a bit but within a minute she was snoozing along with her brothers.
All in all, a really fun evening. But I think we'll wait until she's four before we try again.
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