Dance Cleaning

To my son Tommy,

Today we are having some family over to dye Easter eggs.  That meant your mother was up at 5 am cleaning the house.  When our lazy butts got out of bed around 7:30 much of the hard work was done.  I grabbed a breakfast order from your mom and headed out to Dunkin Donuts to reward your mom with a breakfast sandwich and gas her up with an extra large coffee.

When I got home, I finally downloaded Spotify and put on some music to clean to.  We danced and cleaned and cleaned and danced.  You did much more dancing than cleaning but that is okay.  You kept pulling one of us away to swing dance and spin you.  It was one of those beautiful moments of life that should come more often but don't.  We took a dreaded task such as cleaning and made it into one of those happy family fun moments that are usually only seen in the movies.

While some high energy songs were playing, your mother was impressed and came over and hit like on a few of the songs.  The songs were some German band remaking some Gloria Estefan song or something like that.  The problem was my facebook account was connected and now the radio station seems to only play songs that would be fashionable in the Blue Oyster Bar.  I felt like I was in an episode of King of Queens when a character named Spencer got a TiVo and it kept recording Ice Capades and ballet and musicals despite his best efforts to prove to the machine how manly he is.  Oh well, I will have to "prove" to the software that I much prefer Jimmy Buffett and Bob Marley and Jack Johnson.

Needless to say I have switched who is logged in to the spotify on our computer but just can't find that special "Like" combination that got the high level cleaning fun playlist on.  Your mother can now like away and find the right combination for her.  It is amazing how accurate that software can be on what you will like.  It just shows what big data can do and imagine if that was put to a better use than finding out who is most likely to like the Pretenders.  Of course that gets into privacy issues and big brother government and big brother corporate and a whole mess of concerns and is best left for discussion another day.

Today, I just want to focus on how a task is only as "not fun" as you make it.  Vacuuming, dusting, straightening up, even the most boring menial task can be made fun with the right approach, the right music, and the right mixture and moderation of dance to work.  Plus there will always be a young toddler around like you who will pick up the slack in the amount of dance in the mixture.

Sincerely with love from your Dad,
Leo