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Photography by Pam Thomas, PT Photographie
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Brooklyn
Age: 5 years old
Submitted by: Mom
She says, ‘I want to dress like you. I want to be like you. I want to be you when I grow up,’” Melissa Stolze says of her 5-year-old daughter, Brooklyn. She’s on her way. Here, she stands in sync with her mother at her fitness-studio franchise, barre3 (barre3.com)—which Brooklyn calls “Bar Free”—in Des Peres.
For years, Stolze worked in finance at Boeing. “I would be gone when [my son] got up, and my husband would take him to preschool,” Stolze says. “Then I’d be running in the door, the last mom picking up her kid. I said, ‘There is no balance in my life,’ so I ‘retired.’” After a few years at home and Brooklyn’s birth, Stolze decided to return to the workforce and started researching companies. “I knew I wanted to get into something I had a passion about, and it was fitness,” she says. “I found barre3 and I knew it was a fit for me.”
In the fall, Brooklyn will start kindergarten at Conway Elementary School, but for now, she spends her mornings at the Ladue Early Childhood Center and her afternoons with Mom, often at the studio. “She will come up and do poses with me,” Stolze says. “We just play. We have dance parties when nobody is there.”
RUNNERS-UP
Destiny
Age: 5 years old
Submitted by: Mom
Julia
Age: 6 years old
Submitted by: Mom
Leo
Age: 7 years old
Submitted by: Dad
