Bulky Ballerinas

It's cold here in my hometown. It snowed the other day, enough to delay school 2 hours, and then the wind shifted so it's coming out of the northwest, bringing air straight down from the tundra of northern Saskatchawan, I think. Walking across campus brings tears to one's eyes and makes one's nose red. I got out my down jacket and my wool hat with the fur brim. I imagine they'll be in constant use until March or so.

My guess is that I'll be using my leg-warmers in Tae Kwon Do a lot in the upcoming months. We do have heat in our dojang, but it's not always reliable. And we don't talk a whole lot about getting muscles warmed up, stretching slowly, counterstretching after strength training, cooling down. The children don't need it--I guess that's one reason. But we adults do! So I do it on my own. And I wear my leg warmers!

In ballet on Thursday, we were all bundled up. We have no hesitation about piling on the layers to stay warm: in fact the teachers recommend it to avoid pulled muscles. Protect those muscles is the name of the game in our ballet class. No one at ballet teases me about my leg warmers! Everyone was all bundled up and had various things over their leotard and tights:

Suki (our teacher) was wearing a heavy vest with a fuzzy lining,
Leihren was wearing sweats, leg warmers, and a short sweater,
Sandy wore socks under her ballet slippers and a hooded sweatshirt,
I wore my shrug (a very short sweater, mostly sleeves) and black flared jazz pants. I also wore my ballet skirt over those pants, and I felt like a child again--girls had to wear dresses to school when I was very young, and we would pull snow pants on under the dresses when it got cold!

By the time we were doing center floor (the actual dancing), we were finally warmed up, and our various outer layers were in heaps at the edge of the floor or tied to the barre!