A while ago I attempted to start an afternoon Belly Dancing with Hannah thing. Some days she gets pretty bored at home with me, and we also don’t get out of the house for any physical activity really. My plan has been (and still is) to spend my mornings working and spend my afternoons on Hannah. So, one of the afternoon activities I thought we could take up is belly dancing together. I know she wanted to take lessons, and Rachel would really like to be continuing in it, but it’s not in the budget right now, so this is one more thing that maybe we just do the home-made version.

It will be interesting for me to see if I can relax and keep the long view of things – take my own ego (as the mother) out of it and just let them dance and enjoy it. We’re not doing it so they can be prodigies, right? Well, okay, just a little bit. But I’ll let them be their own kind of prodigies.

At first Hannah wasn’t terribly sure about being told, “I’m going to teach you some belly dance this afternoon” and she thought she should sit on the couch while I show her a move and then she’d decide if she wanted to do it. But I put on some of her favourite music and gave her a pep talk about how we were just going to do a little bit all the time, so she doesn’t have to learn it all at once. We started with side-to-side-hips. And we just danced around the room doing that move. And then I said, “Now shimmy”, because she already knows that one. And then I reminded her that she knows hand circles. “See, you already know a lot of moves,” I told her.

“Hey mom, let’s shimmy and do a side-to-side and do hand circles all at the same time,” she said.

I had to laugh. But you know what? We did. I mean, yes I did – if, after eight years of dance I can’t do those three things at once, that would be pretty sad, but Hannah did them all at once too. It was a slow, sliding side-to-side, but she kept the shimmy going.

And then she laughed, “Mom, when I try to do them at the same time, my hands want to shimmy too.”

It’s so true!

After one song she wanted to stop, and I thought it would be best if we stopped it while it was still fun. Next time maybe we’ll wait until Rachel’s home from school and try to talk her into joining us and we’ll do some games and stuff.

But then she wanted the music still on, and she was playing around and she said, “Mom, is this a dance move?” And she was stepping forward and back with a one-two-three, foot-sweep and clapping on the foot-sweep. I was impressed with the emerging understanding of four-counts, measures and weight-changes. Then she said, “Oh, what’s that dance where the dancer steps like this,” and then she did something like a Saidi step – step-swoosh-step-swoosh. I corrected her swoosh so the foot was going more to the side and she said, “yes, that one. Can we find the video of that and then I can dance along with it and learn all the moves?”

Jesus murphy.