Baby Loves to Dance

For those friends and relatives who have been around Ry should know that he loves to sway and dance to music. One of his favourite activity is to dance to Mickey Mouse clubhouse cartoon every morning that is shown on Disney Channel - something that he never fails to remind me to switch on the tv for him. To encourage his musical and kinestatic talents, we decided to enrol him in a music and dance class, known as Music Together. The fall semester of nine lessons each of 45 mins cost me a whopping USD $210, which also comes together with a song and activity book and 2 CDs of this semester song collection.

So how did the first lesson on Monday goes? Well, Ry pretty enjoyed it since he get to play with musical instruments and dance with scarves as well as various hand motions. Definitely, we can't expect a 18 mth old to follow every activity closely. There were times that Ry was distracted and went around the room touching the switches, the colourful walls and sitting on the heater.

And what about the moms and the caretakers there? We were encouraged to sing aloud, follow the actions so as to encourage participation of the kids. So at the end of the activity, I found myself more tired than Ry since I participated enthusiastically and sang loudly at the top of my voice, hoping to inspire my little one.

Overall, I am pretty proud of Ry's performance. He danced to most of the songs, did his famous quick side to side stomps, shook the rattlers and bells fervously and waved his hands as well as blowed kisses to Kelly, the instructor when we sang the goodbye song. At the end of the lesson, Kelly asked me whether we were returning customers although it was our first time there. She said that it was because Ry was so responsive that she thought that we had done all these before.

The instructor's comments made me feel that I did make the right decision to enrol Ry to the expensive class. K and I are always mindful not to fall into the trap of enrolling our kids to many enrichment classes, hoping that our kids will turn out to be a bright star someday. Our philosophy has always been that only to encourage those activity that our kids enjoy since childhood is the most important time for play. So we have agreed that no English lessons, no Chinese lessons, no gruelling piano, violin classes at preschool age - something that we have seen many parents around us doing. We will only sign up for activities that we see that they would have interest in. Hopefully, we are able to keep to our ideals and not succumb to peer pressure back home. Like what my prof in BC once said, sometimes it is the peer pressure of seeing what other parents do and thinking that your child may lose out in the long run that one would start following suit and enrol the child in many activities.



Ry shaking the eggs to the rthymn of the music and the set of songbook and CDs that we have to play to our kids at home so as to encourage their interests. A pity that I can't take more pics and videos of the lesson as I was busy participating and too embarrased to do it since I'm the only one doing it.


P/S: Ry has found the fun to twirl around and losing his balance today so he had been doing it non-stop to the music that I played from the CD. It was real cute! Hope I can video him in action one day and showed it here.