Encouraging Gift Ideas for a Dancer

The thick of the holiday season is upon us! For our teen daughter that continues to mean Nutcracker performances. For the rest of our family it means the excitement of seeing her perform after many hours, days and weeks of hard work in classes and rehearsals as a dancer. It also means providing  encouragement along the way; with reminders to eat well, rest and generally take care of herself. For me it also means continuing to be available for the conversations that include listening, communicating loving support and positive feedback. This year for the first time it means offering that in whatever ways I can from a distance because she is now pursuing this dream hundreds of miles away from us.

We will be traveling to see the Nashville Ballet's Nutcracker and bringing her home for our Christmas and New Year's celebrations, in the meantime, I've been researching, reading and acquiring resources to share with her over the holidays. Posting the beginnings of that exploration here, for any other dance moms, looking to enjoy the season, calm themselves and support their dancers.

Dancers spend an enormous amount of time moving and being physically active. Along with the physical stamina needed there is a significant amount of mental activity involved. The heightened awareness of the brain and body connection that dancers and other athletes have is usually keen however with the demands of performing in a competitive environment they are often likely to ignore the need to take some time to rest and relax.

Some down time that requires another approach to the kinesthetic mental and physical activity seems like a good idea to this mom of a ballerina.

Reading and instilling the love of reading has been one of the ideas I've worked to implement to counteract the tendency for the competitive young athlete to keep pushing through without taking the necessary break for recovery time. I've put together some favorites and some newly discovered reading resources that will hopefully lead to some relaxed, informative and inspirational reading time for all the dancers in your life.

First for the littles:
These are filled with delightful inspiration for the littlest ballerina. We read our Angelina Ballerina books over and over when our daughter was young.

This little Angelina board book is so cute!

Books for for older teen and young adult dancer:
(Keep scrolling, there's more).

 

Also, an excellent online resource regarding nutrition, that I recently discovered is; To the Pointe Nutrition. Created by Rachel Fine, a nutritionist and dancer she has written nutritionally sound and well researched ebooks for dancers. Look for more about her here on the blog; I'll be posting a longer review of her work in January. All of her work is available at: https://pointenutrition.com/

Here's to a vibrant and happy holiday dance season for all the families attending the wonderfully joyous performances associated with the season! Hang in there. Some rest is soon to follow!