"Challenging," Indeed

Alexis has fallen all the way down the dance rabbit hole. I mean, we're "I drive an hour to a private lesson" level of crazy at this point, so whatever. She's happy and doing exactly what she wants to do, so I will suffer through a FREAKIN 300 MESSAGE LONG GROUP CHAT ABOUT A HOTEL RESERVATION NEXT MARCH.

Ahem.

I said "suffer through." I didn't say I would do it without whining.

ANYWAY. Now that she's riding the Crazy Train up and down the tracks, she has fun things to do like adopt a "little sister" for competition season. It's a very mundane thing that her dance studio does. The big girls on the competitive team get assigned to a little girl and are their "helper" for the season. We skipped being on the little girl side of the equation because I'm not THAT nuts (WHY DO PEOPLE SPEND THOUSANDS FOR THEIR VERY SMALL CHILD TO DANCE WHYYYYYYYYY I AM SO CONFUSED), but being on the Big Sister side of it seems to make Alexis happy.

The whole assignment thing happened over the weekend at our annual "Back to sucking your pockets dry" party at the dance studio. I think they call it "Back to dance" but we know what's really happening. So a little girl drew Alexis' name and together the two of them ran off to get to know each other.

Mila saw it happen. Families are invited to the "Back to sucking your pockets dry" party so Mila was watching everything as it happened. A little girl named Samantha was assigned to Alexis and off they ran to talk.

Possibly related: I now know what it looks like when raging waves of bright green jealousy shoot out of a 5-year old at light speed.

They are definitely related issues. Mila screeched, "But I'm the little sister!" and started bawling for her big sister.

She.

Was.

Livid.

And hurt.

And all kinds of sad. "I'm the only little sister!" she wailed at one point. She even broke free of my grasp, hunted down Alexis, and climbed her like she's a tree or something. Mila did everything she could to lay claim to her sister, including glaring at poor Samantha (who is probably 7 or 8 years old and has clearly never been the object of someone's disdain before - SORRY SAMANTHA). She cried. She screamed. She generally was a giant jealous jerk, to the point that I made her leave. For real, Alexis stayed at her dance party and Mila was escorted off the premises because she could not find her chill. Not even a giant pile of cookies could make her forget just how jealous she was that her sister had a "little sister."

We've been talking about the whole scene for the past few days now. Mila is still working on processing what happened and even though we've explained that there is only one REAL little sister, she's still mad. So mad. After we talked about it for another half hour today on the way home from, you guessed it, dance class, Mila very seriously looked up at me and flatly said, "That was a really challenging day for me."

WELP.