Born To Sing And Dance

Our 5 year old daughter R arrived on this planet on a hot sunny day in June 2001. Not long after, she started exhibiting the traits of a performer.

All of our kids, and if you have kids most likely all of yours as well, have a bit of performer in them. They like to get and keep your attention with shouts of “Watch me do this! Watch me do that!”

What stood out about R to us is that all of her performances, even at 2 years old, involved performing a loosely choreographed dance to a song on the CD player. She collected dance moves and strung them together into impromptu performances whenever she could convince us to play Jump5 or Hilary Duff. The golden moments for her were when we had friends or family over to our house. At a certain point in the evening, a moment she no doubt was waiting for like a cat watches a mouse choosing the exact moment to pounce, R would ask our guests if she could perform a number for them.

The music would play, and she would lip sync the song while dazzling the crowd with her latest dance moves. A few new ones sprinkled in with the re-tread moves her 3 older sisters had seen ad nausea.

One night she kind of freaked Michelle and I out. We had friends over- Chris and Brooke- and R insisted on performing for them. She chose “So Yesterday” by Hilary Duff- her specialty. Often times when she performs, we are sitting in the great room giving her tons of space to do her best work. This night we all happened to be standing around the kitchen island and R’s stage became the kitchen floor. I guess she decided to do some improvisation and use the props the kitchen provided her- about halfway through the song, amidst her familiar dance moves, she pulled out a move not seen in our house ever.

We have one of those big built-in stainless steel refrigerators, and the handles to the two side-by-side doors are long perfectly smooth poles that run the height of the refrigerator. They are relatively large and protrude a good 5 inches or so from the doors. This was key to R’s new dance move.

She sashayed over to the refrigerator during the chorus, and pulled out her big move. She grabbed onto the pole and did a 100% authentic hoochified sexy pole dance. She lifted her legs off the ground, and sort of spun on the pole all the way to the ground, threw her head and hair back, and gave us all her best glamour look. She was 4 years old.

Michelle and I were stunned. Chris and Brooke erupted in laughter. At the end of the dance move Michelle jumped in and said “ok, that’s all for tonight” while I went and turned off the music. We casually inquired of R where she learned that particular dance move, assuming she had seen it somewhere- perhaps on a music video on Disney, or who knows where else.

She insisted that she had made it up herself.






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