What I Learned from Hip-Hop

Well, it seems that sitting in the house for ten years eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches is not the best thing for your waistline, especially if you have been pregnant eight times within nine years.  Pregnancy teaches your tummy how to grow so that your body knows exactly what to do with any extra calories you may consume.  If it weren't for this phenomenon, mothers would never have the joy of being asked "When are you due" when they are not, in fact, pregnant.  This is something about which I hope to one day discuss with Eve during our conversation on "Why did you eat the damn apple?".

I have noticed that I only enjoy one type of physical activity, and that is dance.  I am not a dancer, and have restraining orders against my ever trying to dance again, so I try to only do it at home with the blinds shut because I don't like jail.

Diets make me angry.  Not the lack of food, but diets in general.  If I hear someone say "diet" I have an immediate attack of rage, so I thought maybe some new dance work-outs would be the best way for me to get back into shape.  (Notice the use of the word "back", as if "shape" was a place I have ever been -- the only shape I know is circle.)  I have a salsa DVD, which I love, but I am bored with it, so yesterday I was in the store trying to decide between swing and hip-hop.  The logical choice would be swing -- I love swing, it's somewhat applicable to real life, and it's easier on my poor old back than jumping around punching at air.  So, after thinking it through, I chose to buy hip-hop so that I could come back and get swing when I realize how old I am.

This morning, after a healthy breakfast, I was feeling really on track.  I warmed up by kicking everything on the living room floor into one corner.  There were a lot of things on the floor, so this was a great warm up.  I put in the DVD and banished my oldest two children from the living room.  The boys have a history of giggling at my dancing, saying things like, "Mommy, show Daddy that dance you were doing -- it was FUNNY!" or "heeheehee -- look at Mommy!  Is she trying to do the same thing that girl on TV is doing???".  Knowing that I shouldn't be attempting hip-hop, I knew that I had no choice but to banish the boys.

So, at the start of the video, all you have to do is take steps side-to-side, and I'm thinking "I so got this".  That lasts about two and a half seconds until the girl starts kicking and doing these things with her feet that make no sense whatsoever.  She's saying "up, up, down-down-down, crazy march and back-of-the-room and punch it!", and it seems that someone has led her to believe that these words somehow correspond with what she's doing with her feet.  After a couple minutes of that, she says "Now for the arms!"  I hurt my foot somewhere between the second "up" and "back-of-the-room", so I was excited about arms.  At least until I realized that "arms" go with "feet", and as I was trying to do a "cross-over-pull-it-up" at the same time as a "jiggy-jump", I fell over.  Since my foot was really hurting and I could hear my boys giggling from their spying spot in the hallway, I figured that it would be best to stay on the floor and just watch the rest so that I would know what is coming tomorrow and be awesome at it.  If I can be perfectly honest here, I didn't even have the energy to watch it, so instead I wrote a list of things I had learned.  Here ya' go...

What I Learned From Hip-Hop
1.  Half of making the dance look good is the clothes -- the hillbilly look I currently sport doesn't fly.
2.  I need better shoes.
3.  Jumping and punching is a good way to learn the areas which need toning.
4.  People who can dance like this and rap at the same time are true athletes.
5.  I don't have cute, bouncy, dancer hair, nor do I know how to acquire it.
6.  "Jiggy-jump" and "jiggy-kick" go together only if you can "pull-it-up" with your arms.
7.  "Pull-it-up" does NOT apply to the baggy pants as I had previously thought. 
8.  Barring a desperate need to embarrass my children, there will never be an occasion for me to use the steps I learned today.
9.  "Bootie" is required, not for looks, but for balance.  (Looks like I have one thing going for me.)
10.  I do have the ability to go "up, up, down-down-down", but just because you can do something does not mean you should.