It’s that time of year when parents everywhere are pressing record to capture the cuteness of their kids reciting poems and singing songs in holiday productions. All of those adorable costumes mispronounced words, and singing off-key is exactly the kind of thing that melts a mom’s heart. But for one mom, it was an unfortunate encounter with a hangnail that got everyone feeling moved to tears…of laughter. One little girl cracked up her audience by accidentally flipping off the audience and now Instagram can’t stop laughing thanks to her mom’s post.
Carla Bovingdon was happily watching her daughter, five-year-old Ella play an angel in her Essex southeast England school’s nativity play. But when Ella started waving around her finger to show her mom that she hurt it, the nativity play suddenly went from sweet to pure comedy.
“She likes to let me know if she’s at all injured, so she was basically trying to show me what she had done from across the room…Then she put both her fingers up because she was trying to compare to see if both fingers were hurt,” Bovington told Fatherly.
Bovington tried her best to mouth to Ella to put her finger down, but it didn’t work. The bird-flipping angle gave the audience one heck of a show for 20 of the 30 minutes of the play.
Like most five-year-olds, Ella was oblivious to what all the laughter was about. She even wasn’t sure she understood the attention her picture on Instagram was getting.
“She wanted to say thank you to everyone for liking her picture, but then she said, ‘I don’t know what’s funny though,'” Bovington told Fatherly. “She doesn’t get what the joke is. She just thinks she looks cute but doesn’t know why we’re all laughing which is quite funny.”
Happy holidays! May you capture the fun and occasionally hilarious episodes of your kid’s recitals and plays this year too.
