LU’s Finest at UFS!

On Monday LU’s Finest (Lehigh’s Step Team) performed at United Friends School (Kyle and Owen’s School). It was awesome! We’ve always celebrated our Adoption Day as a family with something experiential (i.e., an experience, but no material gifts). But this year, Kyle and Owen’s fabulous new teacher at their fabulous new school wanted to bring their Adoption Day into school too. She wanted to treat it as she’d treat a birthday in her class… and we were all (K & O especially) so happy about this idea (and especially about her initiating it! Wow!). And so she asked us what we’d like to do. I knew I didn’t want to bring in cupcakes (the norm, it seems, for 6-year-old school birthdays), and instead do something experiential. What I really wanted was to bring a piece of the essence of K & O into their school. I came up with the idea of bringing LU’s Finest for a performance – as a celebration of K & O’s Adoption Day and as a Kick-Off for African-American History Month. I got the go-ahead from their school, and then I went to work to arrange for our favorite Step Team to come perform at UFS on Monday, January 31 (K & O’s Adoption Day, and also the day before the start of African-American History Month). Lucky for us, I have some connections with the team (!), and they agreed to do it. UFS was so excited about this that they planned an all-school assembly on Monday afternoon so that everyone could get in on the Stepping. LU’s Finest went above and beyond my wildest expectations, and came up with an entire program designed especially for the school. They did many awesome Stepping routines, spoke to the kids about the history and significance of Stepping, did an interactive Stepping lesson/workshop, and then they sat on the stage and did a great Q&A session with the kids. The kids loved it! When LU’s Finest would ask for volunteers to come up on stage, so many kids would want to do it that the stage would be overflowing and teachers would have to pull kids back down to the audience in order to avoid total chaos. It was loud! it was rhythmic! it was alive! it was stomping and clapping and slapping and slamming! it was shouting and smiling! it was full-on-energy-and-energizing! it was completely-interactive! it was fun! You could literally feel the Lehigh kids connecting with the United Friends School kids. It was dynamic and wild and over-the-top! There was lots of laughing and lots of high-fiving. It brought a piece of the essence of K & O into their school. It was the perfect in-school celebration of K & O’s Adoption Day. And the icing on the cake?!~~ about five minutes into the show, who shows up, as a total surprise, standing at the back of the room?!… none other than our old babysitter (and previous Captain of LU’s Finest), our beloved Jessica Jean (click)! It literally took my breath away when I looked up and saw her standing there with her new baby and her man (her baby just happens to be one of the cutest babies I’ve ever seen, and her man just happens to be one of my old students too)! They had come all the way from NYC to be there for the show. It was the best Adoption Day ever!