If You Can Walk You Can Dance

I started taking dance lessons when I was around 3 years old. As best I can recall, my first class was a tap class, or maybe a tap/jazz combination. I still have the photos my mother snapped of me in my first dance recital. I wore a red leotard with white fringe around the waist, red tights, and black tap shoes. We danced to “It’s the Bump”. And if the photos are accurate, I had a pretty good time. I continued with dance until I was 10, took a few years off, and then started up again when I was in high school. I had my last recital just before I headed off to college.

I’ve always enjoyed dancing. Though, I’ll say with absolute certainty that I am not a particularly great dancer. That is to say, I do not have any natural talent. My arms and legs don’t always work well together, and I don’t have the kind of confidence required to just let it all flow without really thinking about it.

Still, this past spring when I was starting to feel like I needed to change up my workouts, I was so excited to see that there were some dance classes on my gym’s schedule. I started taking Zumba, and then joined Power Dance shortly after. I’ll admit that I felt really, really lost for the first few weeks and probably looked like the biggest fool ever. But now that I’ve gotten the hang of most of the basic steps,  I’m finding both classes to be really good workouts and a nice change from my routines on the treadmill and elliptical machine.

Power Dance meets mid-morning on Tuesdays, so the kids come along and play in the gym’s playroom while I do my workout. Recently Tiny asked about what my class was like, and after I explained that we spent the hour learning a dance routine (similar to what you might see performed at a half-time show for a sporting event), she decided that she needed to see it. So, today, I checked with the teacher* to make sure it would be okay, and then agreed to pick up Tiny and Buba early from childcare so they could see the last 5-10 minutes of the class (when we usually run through the whole routine 2-3 times before ending). They sat very quietly in the front corner and watched as we performed our routine several times.

When the class was all over, Buba announced, “I want to do that. Just me! With no other ladies dancing.” The instructor was about to start an abs workout and put on some pop music for background noise. Both Buba and Tiny took to the floor and started dancing their little hearts out. It was mostly just jumping and spinning, but they seemed to be having such a great time. The teacher joked that she might have to steal some of their dance moves for her next routine. And perhaps a dance class of their own might be necessary in the not too distant future.

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*side note about the teacher: I’ve been taking her zumba and dance classes for about 3 months now and just recently discovered that not only does she know my husband (T taught her oldest son), but she’s the generous woman who gave us crib mattresses, bedding, and a scheduling template for twins when she learned through T that I was expecting twins (way back in January of 2008).  She is also a mother of twins (hers are now 8 years old) and was so nice to pass along good advice and the things her boys no longer needed. It really is such a small world.