When Did Maddie Ziegler Start Dancing?

Sometimes when I see wildly successful children who are not even teenagers yet, I start to question my own life and slowly enter into an existential crisis. Thankfully, that only lasts for a short time and soon I am just in awe of such awesome talent that is being found so young! (Tell me you don't waste hours of your time watching dancing babies on Facebook? You know you do.) Such was the deal when I first saw Maddie Ziegler in Sia's music video for "Chandelier." Like millions of people around the globe, I was captivated by the immense talent of this young girl and this got me thinking: how did Maddie Ziegler start dancing and discover her gifts of spastic movement and expressive eyes?

When I first saw the "Chandelier" video, I didn't know who the young dancer was, as I had never watched Dance Moms. But at this point, the Lifetime reality show had already gained a very impassioned cult following. The show follows the lives of dancers and their families at the Abby Lee Dance Company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ziegler has appeared on the show with her younger sister, Mackenzie, since the beginning, and this is actually where she kicked off her dancing career.

So when did the 12-year-old first step into a dance studio? When she was two years old. Yes, she was TWO. It is a great thing to know that there are such driven kids out there that just know what they love and want to keep doing it. In an interview with Pigeons and Planes she said of her beginnings,

I started dancing when I was two. I went to the ballet studio for like a year and I actually wanted to do hip-hop so I went to try it out, but I ended up doing a lot of tap, ballet, and jazz.

Can you imagine a 3-year-old deciding she would "try out" hip hop? Dancing as 3-year-old for me involved running around my backyard with a torn up tutu and bucket on my head, but to each his own! According to her official website, Ziegler's mom, Melissa, enrolled her in the Abbey Lee Dance Company when she was four years old. It was there that her love for dance grew and she won awards in various competitions in the lyrical and tap styles.

Cut to 2011 and Ziegler, her sister, and their mom are stars on a Lifetime reality show. Apparently a fan of the show, singer Sia contacted Ziegler through Twitter and asked if she would like to be in her video. Ziegler told Pigeons and Planes,

I guess she saw a couple of the shows and she saw me and she said she wanted to meet me and she wanted me to dance to her song... I was nervous at first because sometimes I have to turn things down because of either when we’re filming or dance or whatever, but I actually got to do this one, so it was really fun.

Well, 700 MILLION YouTube views later and at only 12 years old, the girl's got the world at her finger tips.

Images: Getty Images; Giphy (1)