Harlem Shake Playdate

If there's anything that's easy to do, it should be feeding kids a bunch of sugar and then asking them to go crazy for about ten seconds.  

I mean, right?

So, I bribed my lovely mama friends and their offspring with bakery tea cookies and gathered them all up on a Monday morning.  It was such a perfect, almost-spring day out there.  I had windows open and lemon berry tea and fat strawberries on a pretty plate.

I got the first half of video done right away, the part where they are supposed to be calmly reading or coloring or just standing still...not really paying attention to Annika while she crazy-danced in the middle of the room.  That seemed like it would be hard.

But the kids were suprisingly perfect. They didn't even really seem to wonder what in the world Annika was doing.  (Should I wonder why that seemed so normal?.....Nah.)

And then it came time for the wild Harlem Shake part.  We moms passed out cowboy hats and ballerina tutus and super hero capes and fairy wings and then bottled them all up inside the playroom.  

Cue the music!

But.... not so much. :) 

They weren't feeling the costumes, or maybe it was the strange music, or maybe it was the pressure of the spotlight and video camera and moms in the background saying, "Show me your moves! Dance! Spin! Can you spin?"

Seriously, have we already reached the age that we can't get them to dance around for M&M cookies??  Because that's too old.

But despite the blank stares and shedding of costumes and random spurts of quick dancing before running away, we laughed a lot and they still looked adorable.  And suprisingly, Annika- the one who usually melts under too much structure and pressure, was unstoppable.  I was lucky that I could pull the audio off the original video because I could not stop laughing.

So with a little bit of editing magic, I still pulled together plenty of short clips of happy dancing. Here's the final video! And the enthusiastic mamas behind the camera were just as funny and adorable as they tried to encourage their kiddos to dance. 

(Harlem Shake Mama's video, anyone?)

And finally, after three times of the Harlem shake on replay, we let 'em loose and got to enjoy the perfect afternoon on our perfect little hill. 

I will miss this place and these faces and these memories so much.