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I have a photo album called "Dance Parties", the first photo in it is early March 2020 with my 4 and 2 year old kids in the bath tub and the only light coming from the glow stick bracelets and necklaces they were wearing. I remember my wife playing music from her phone for them while they "partied" in the tub. This wasn't the first dance party, but pretty near it.
The real first Daddy Dance Party was much less planned. I was playing music on my phone, the boys started dancing to it, I picked up the "fireworks lights" that Santa had brought the boys and lit up the room with them. Kids just have a unique desire to move with the music and no cares about who sees them dancing to it. The boys were having fun and so I decided to steer into it.
With the pandemic disrupting so many things, I wanted to have a new thing to do and made the first purchase, a "Disco light" from Amazon. It packed the ceiling with tons of different shapes moving all about. The first time I used it, the kids just sat down and watched the ceiling while listening to the music.
We only had time for two songs that night. The next time I set it up, they were back to "dancing" around. I put dancing in quotes because it wasn't dancing in the rhythm with the music, or (thankfully) anything that would have been on Club MTV. "Dancing" was just a great way to burn energy
Photo by Colin FitzGerald on Unsplash
I already had a Bluetooth battery powered speaker to play the music on to make it a little louder and so the dance parties started. It wasn't much, but did allow me to have enough volume to have the kids in the back yard and be able to hear it as they jumped around.
On more than one hot night that summer, we ended up outside dancing around sprinklers in the flashing lights. Thinking back, I wish I had my waterproof puck speakers the new ones have light rings around the speakers.
The early Kids Dance Party playlist started with Kidboomers, Dora the Explorer, and Ping Fong. Each time I did a dance party, I tried out one or two of the suggested tracks to see how the kids reacted. If they liked it, it got added to the list. I added a few of the tracks I liked that were from movies they knew and rounded out the playlist with some fun random tracks like "Ferry de Rose Flamingo" and "HeliKopter".
Our dance parties have come along way since then, If you want to see how far, check out My Current Party
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