{"id":33280,"date":"2008-11-03T15:20:23","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T15:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2008\/11\/03\/dance\/"},"modified":"2008-11-03T15:20:23","modified_gmt":"2008-11-03T15:20:23","slug":"dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2008\/11\/03\/dance\/","title":{"rendered":"Dance!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Somewhere in the past few years, my oldest son stopped dancing. I’m not exactly sure when or why, but I noticed it a few weeks back as we were watching the end of Madagascar<\/em>. Madagascar<\/em>, in case you haven’t seen it, ends with the song “I Like to move it, move it!” <\/p>\n

It’s a get-off-the-couch-and-dance sort of moment, with a strong beat and lots of silly cartoon characters doing strange dances on the screen. My youngest, as always, leaped up and started dancing. I did too.<\/p>\n

My oldest, however, just sat on the couch like a lump.<\/p>\n

“Come on!” I said. “It’s dance time!”<\/p>\n

“No,” he grumped.<\/p>\n

I whisked my youngest off the ground and danced with him in the air for a while. He laughed and spun before flying back into the couch with a big old belly laugh. He rolled off the couch and launched into a break dancing routine.<\/p>\n

My oldest started to get up to join in, then stopped himself.<\/p>\n

“Come on,” I said. “You know you want to.”<\/p>\n

“No!”<\/p>\n

I danced over to him and tried to pull him off the couch, but he scurried away from me. In the ensuing struggle, I ended up holding him upside down by his ankles.<\/p>\n

“Dadd-ee-ee,” he shouted.<\/p>\n

Once you find yourself holding your six year old upside down by his ankles, there’s really not too much you can do. “Sorry,” I said, “I got to move it, move it” and I resumed dancing, gently swaying him back and forth.<\/p>\n

He started to laugh. Then his little brother danced over and tickled him.<\/p>\n

He lauged harder.  His face turned a not-too-delicate shade of pink. I gently stretched him out on the couch, careful not to bump his head. <\/p>\n

He rolled off, still laughing, and launched into a dancing frenzy. “I got to move it, move it!”<\/p>\n

He’s back to dancing after movies again – most of the time. Sometimes he dances and sometimes he jumps off the couch and runs away from me. I guess you’d have to call it a mixed victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Somewhere in the past few years, my oldest son stopped dancing. I’m not exactly sure when or why, but I noticed it a few weeks back as we were watching the end of Madagascar. Madagascar, in case you haven’t seen it, ends with the song “I Like to move it, move it!”  It’s a get-off-the-couch-and-dance sort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,118,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6DpYi-dance","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}