My Tiny Dancer

My daughter has started to dance.

I'm not making this up. I couldn't believe my eyes when I say it either.

As regular readers of my blog will know, my daughter has a habit of pulling herself up to stand in front of the television when her favourite programmes are on. Very often she will bang her hands on the table top or if she has a toy to hand, bang that up and down on the table instead.

Invariably this has been an accompaniment to music on the TV but not always.

But she's pretty much over night added a whole new dimension to her TV watching behaviour.

Appropriately, she was watching Angelina Ballerina on TV when she first aired her dancing

skills.

The theme music started up and my daughter began to jiggle up and down on the spot.

My husband was also there to witness this and we both looked at each other and then at my daughter and back at each other again, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, hardly believing what we were witnessing.

To further compound that her bouncing was not just a random whim, as soon as the theme music stopped, my daughter stopped bouncing, and oblivious to the surprise and delight she had caused in her mummy and daddy, continued to watch the TV screen.

And this was no fluke either. On a number of occasions since, she has danced to theme music. Rory the Racy Car is a big favourite. Her dancing skill has also come on. It doesn't just involve bouncing up and down now. She does a little side to side motion, with a bend of the knee on one

side and then a bend of the knee on the other, her head nodding along in time to the music. She already has a very good sense of rhythm but then I was just the same, apparently.

My mum likes to tell the story of how I was in the pushchair one day and she stopped to watch a string quartet busking at the side of the street and my little foot started tapping up and down in time with the music. But I can't imagine being able to display such amazing dancing skill when I was my daughter's age.

Oh my daughter, you never fail to make me smile.

In the words of Elton John – “Hold me closer tiny dancer, count the headlights on the highway...”