Caroline LOVED it. She was grinning from ear to ear the entire time. Every time the teacher did a new or difficult move Caroline would twist her sassy and expressive little face into the most hilarious looks and kept cracking the teacher up. She never even took a break to get water. Apparently they did Zumba in her 2nd grade class sometimes as energizers, because Mrs. Speckman is da bomb.
Charlotte was very intense. She hardly smiled because she was so focused on trying to figure out the moves, and unfortunately the girl has no rhythm and very little coordination. She was not a fan because she could feel that it was working her stomach muscles.
Celia, oh Celia my dear love. I was hesitant to even take her since she's five (although her emotional age is more like a 3 year old) plus she finds any excuse to complain about everything...EVERYTHING. She does love to dance though so I let her come to check it out. In the beginning she seemed to have fun. She was making the older ladies in the class laugh a lot when she would shake her cute little booty. About 30 minutes in she started to cry because she wanted to leave the class and go running around the track. At this point, for the sake of making it through the last half hour, I told her she could just do her own moves, dance however she wanted. That helped. With 10 minutes left she asked me who she was supposed to be watching. That might explain her look of confusion for the previous 50 minutes. She's my blonde.
As I said before I went into this expecting it to be lower impact than typical Zumba and am still very out of shape. I am also recovering from my third intestinal resectioning surgery from Crohn's Disease. So it came as no surprise to me that about 40 minutes into the class I feel something below the belt that made me panic. Was it booty sweat or was it something more???!! Oh good Lord, did I just poop my pants at family Zumba class?? I went to the bathroom and much to my relief it was simply sweat. I, in fact, was dripping with sweat and, when I looked in the mirror, my face was as red as my red t-shirt I was wearing. Like, for real, only a shade away from fire engine red. As I went back into the class I noticed that all of the other women in the class were older than me, like significantly. All of them were as pale as me, and NONE of them had red faces! LOL! Once again, the older chicks were in better shape than me and kicking my butt at Zumba. This felt very familiar since I had the same experience in a Jazzercise class last year which I blogged about then as well.
Here's another observation I made. If you've ever taken a Zumba or Jazzercise class, you may have had that moment where you are in the groove, you are keeping up! You must look pretty good doing this! You think to yourself "After this class the instructor is probably going to come ask me if I've done this before. She will probably tell me that I should become a teacher myself! I am rocking this!" Then you make the mistake of looking at yourself in the mirror. OH NO! Who is that freak looking back at you?! Turns out that you don't look nearly as cute and coordinated doing it in real life as you do in your head! I danced competitively for my entire childhood and even was on the dance team of a professional sports team in college, and even I look like a silly fool during these classes!
