Some Days You Gotta Dance

Well, the last of the summer concert series' came to an end last night, and fittingly for Gina and me it was a swing theme. Another opportunity to teach my kids a valuable lesson. As the Dixie Chicks song goes (and for fear of reveleaing my closeted affection for country music I won't mention that I'm fairly certain the song was really written by Keith Urban. ... doh!): "Some days you gotta dance, live it up when you get the chance. When the world don't make no sense then you're feeling just a little too tense, you gotta loosen up those chains and dance!" My growing list of things I want to teach my girls includes the ability to dance. And I don't mean the ability to dance well, just the ability to dance period. It's an incredibly freeing experience to move to music. My mom instilled the knowledge of dance on me a long, long time ago - but I was always a little shy about making the move on to the dance floor in front of a crowd (I know, me "shy" in front of a crowd - since when!). But since Gina's come along I've learned that all those other people be damned, I have fun when I dance! My mom has one of the cliche saying signs somewhere in here house - "dance like nobody's watching". Screw that. Dance like EVERYBODY is watching. Because it shouldn't matter. You should be free enough in yourself the enjoy life regardless of those watching. I had to reteach that to Gina last night. We were in a park, so there really wasn't a dance floor, and at most there were two other couples dancing. She kept turing down my requests to dance (what wife turns down a husbands request to dance?). I finally dragged her to the front just before we had to go and we did our thing. We were a little rusty, true (in fact at the end of the song I tried to bring Gina in so I could dip her but she misread the cue and nearly took my head off with a close line straight to my throat) but we enjoyed ourselves. We enjoyed ourselves enough to run back on the floor for one more even though we were approaching 8:30 (our girls are such troopers)! And I'm glad my children will get to see that. I don't really remember my parents dancing. I'm sure they did, but I remember my mom dragging me out, not my dad. And maybe that's because she wanted to teach me the ways of the force, but I think it's because she didn't have fun with him. I want my children to see us have fun with each other. I want them to see our example of what "happy" is - because if there's one thing I want for them in life it's to find a love like I've found. Someone who makes them happy. Somone who has fun with them. Someone who they can be with who will dance with them like everybody's watching. Oh, and they had a free caricature artist at the park, so you can see the girls as a work of art below. I think they lady did a good job. She even got their noses right!