Dancing With The Ron

I’ve always liked the week between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s a time for my family to relax from the holiday stress, enjoy the gifts received and indulge before the New Year’s resolutions kick in. Our 21-year-old son is home from college, so the whole family is together.

Two weeks ago we were all gathered in the living room, the unwrapped presents still under the tree. Suddenly, my wife and our 13-year-old daughter decided they wanted to exercise to a workout DVD they just received. It was a Dancing With The Stars, Dance off the Pounds DVD.

Three of the dancers from the show teach you basic dance steps that are used for an aerobic workout. My son and I decided to grab a ringside seat as the two ladies embarked on this mini dance-a-thon. I was kind of hoping they would be terrible so we could tease them.

I started to egg them on and even remarked that my boy and I could probably out-dance them.

Truth be told, though, they both were really good. Of course, our daughter is a dancer and my wife at one time was asked to be an aerobics instructor. Still, we gave them a pretty hard time.

After a while they had enough of us, and challenged my son and me to get up and do the work-out.

As I hit the floor in front of the TV, I yelled out, “How hard can this be?” They hit “play” and suddenly the Nagasawa men had to put our money where our mouths are. It didn’t taste good.

We kept bumping into each other and it looked more like Convulsing With The Stars. Just as I was doing the “kick, ball, change” move, I tripped over a jar of toffee peanuts someone gave me for Christmas and I went sailing right smack into our Christmas tree, bringing down all that tinsel glory.

After it was established that I wasn’t injured, the whole family started laughing and my wife capped it off by exclaiming, “Fail!”

I kind of thought she would appreciate that I took the tree down before New Year’s.