Children’s chatter – Who do you dance with?
Now I’m back dancing again, I’m trying to get there 2 nights a week. That helps on the fitness side, but also gives me a bit of a social life outside of work – although I don’t see many of my old friends there there’s only so much chatting and socialising I actually do.
Me dancing does seem to confuse N a little though, and it makes it hard to get the bedtime routine done on time and bedtime stories read before I leave.
N has asked what dancing I do. Sometimes I dance around the kitchen but it must look a bit odd seeing only half of a dance and minus a partner. When I try encouraging N to dance with me he isn’t having any of it.
Rather than explaining the dancing I do, I tried to find some on YouTube. I couldn’t find the old video of me dancing years ago (busking in a shopping centre!) so I’ll have to try and find that, but we did find some moves. He wasn’t too excited by what he saw (modern jive videos on YouTube aren’t always the best to showcase it), so I tried showing him west coast swing dancing to a track he likes and that went down a bit better….for all of about a minute before he wandered off.
After he’s had his stories at night, he always asks me what I’ve been up to at work before he’ll tell me what he’s been doing at school. But one night before I was off dancing, he came out with
‘Who do you dance with?’
Hmm, that’s a fair question given it’s not his dad (the OH refuses to even try dancing and won’t even dance at barn dances when they call out all the steps!).
‘A mix of people. In class sometime I dance as the leader so I dance with girls, but most of the time with other men’
‘But who are they?’
How do I tell him that much of the time I have no idea who they are. They’re just the men who go dancing, many of them I’ve known and danced with many times and some for several years, but I still don’t know their names. Even more embarrassing when a lot of them know my name because I used to be up on stage demoing or a taxi dancer so my name was always mentioned. But it gets to the stage where you’ve ‘known’ them too long to ask.
‘Well, sometimes it’s men I’ve known at dancing classes for a long time, other times I don’t know their names, we just dance, then say thanks and move on to the next partner’.
‘What are their names?’
‘Well, the ones I dance with a lot are Mike, Rob, Charlie, Sam, James. Just lots of different people’
‘Oh. Ok’
And that seemed to be it.
It does make me laugh that N seems to be all about the questions but then isn’t that fussed about the answers. I like that he asks what I’m up to though, because the OH hates asking about all that kind of thing, and really it’s a good skill to have in relationships and working life.
Do your children always want to know what you’re up to in and out of work? What kind of questions have they got you stumped on?
