if you take a 3 year old to the theatre

Oliver and I had never been to a performance of the Pittsburgh International Children's Theatre until today. I think it is now safe to say Oliver enjoys musical theatre. He sat on my lap, mesmerized except for applauding at all the right times, for the entire show. It didn't hurt that the troupe presented seven stories in 50 minutes, so nothing dragged on for very long. Even if there had been a dud (there wasn't) it would have been over quickly.

The only hiccup in an otherwise perfect mother-son outing was running into Oliver's buddy Jonah. Seeing Jonah was great. Seeing Jonah head for the "patron" section of the theatre was not so great, seeing as we did not fork over the $100 donation to be patrons and therefore had to sit with the riff-raff. That is until 5 minutes to show time when they let the riff-raff move into the many empty rows of patron seating. By then we were settled and the seats near Jonah were taken anyway. Fortunately, we can upgrade even though we bought tickets for the whole series of performances. That's a smart non-profit for you.

Anyway, the performance was "If You Give a Pig a Pancake(and other stories)". Oliver has read If You Give a Moose a Muffinand If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, but all of these stories were new to him, and to me too. He really wanted to stop by the book sale table on our way out but they didn't have one of his favorites from the show (Diary of a Worm) and the line was long so we kept going. I liked The Paper Bag Princess, and really hope Eleanor likes it too since she's probably getting it for Christmas.

Oliver really surprised me, both by being a great theatre companion and by not asking to leave part way through. I once took a five year old to his first movie theatre experience and it didn't last 10 minutes. It seems the child had never seen a live action movie, with real people. He had previously only seen animated movies, a tidbit his parents failed to share with me. It's a good thing this went well since we bought the whole series. Next month? The Velveteen Rabbit!