Daddy, daddy cool

They say classical music stimulates the brain, but it’s disco that stimulates the feet.

The boys and I dug up some ’70s disco and ripped up the parquetry floor at home with our dancing shoes on.

The mini men love the fact one song has my name in it, so we have to repeat the song about 100 times in a row.

I made the boys a playlist on my iPod, which I must confess is a confection of pop, a little slow-paced and a whole lot of crazy dance music.

My mother used to teach us kids how to dance with a vacuum cleaner on a Saturday morning.  She would mysteriously be in eyeshadow at 9am in a dress, gloves and Ajax, singing and dancing in the bathroom. She would boogie making the gravy for dinner.

When Dad came in and turned the record player down, she’d float over, turn it up and wink at us kids who were dancing in the lounge room.

If the television was ever on, it was usually a classic or a musical. No wonder I thought I was Olivia Newton-John from the age of three. We sat in the drive-in cinema twice just to see Xanadu.

When the boys stay with me, I rarely put the television on unless we watch a movie, so it’s usually music as we work.

Beau has the funkiest dance moves and is quite the ‘little hands in the air’ dancer. Chick, on the other hand, is your cement-feet, sway from side to side man, but he’s slowly starting to shake his hips.

The three of us were hand in hand walking down the street and Beau started singing a Carpenters classic. The boys picked up Karen from the end credits of Open Season 2, which is hysterical. So we sang the song as we waited for the green man at the lights.

Heading home, a little voice from the back seat of the car asked for his favourite song.  “What is it, my little man?” I asked.  “Fireflies,” he looked up in question.

“Geez, kiddo, you can’t clean your house to it, so I probably don’t have it,” I winked at him in the rear vision mirror.