Dancing Cheek To Cheek

We have this new video camera that we bought for the expressed purpose of recording our children. They do such funny things so often, and we really wanted to preserve such fun memories (for blackmail purposes when they're teenagers). But the problem we're having is that both of my kids know the camera is rolling. And for my daughter, that means she wants to get behind the camera and look at the screen. So we rarely get a video of her for more than a few seconds before she runs at the camera and can't be seen anymore. Most of her videos involve a lot of blank wall space with her talking right into the microphone.

My son has a different reaction. When he sees that red light on, he gets really shy all of a sudden. He'll go from singing his ABCs to biting his finger and looking away in two seconds if he knows he's being recorded. And we've tried tricking him into it. We've covered the red light. We've tried to hide the camera. We've even attempted bribery. But nothing we do will warm him up to it. However, we do have a lot of videos of him dancing and singing and being silly. And that's because there's one scenario when he's totally comfortable in front of the camera; when he's only wearing underwear. So ask him to sing and dance while he's fully clothed, and he'll look at his shoes and smile sheepishly. But ask him to take off his clothes and act like an idiot, and he'll immediately oblige.

The problem is that we don't want people to get the idea that our kids are never clothed. So we can't post a bunch of videos on Facebook of my son jumping around in his Batman briefs. So we just have to tell people about it, which is not as funny or cute. And the saddest part is that the more naked he gets, the more awesome his dance moves become. If he's wearing his Sunday best, he dances like Elaine on Seinfeld. But if he's stark naked, it's like watching a dance prodigy. And it's a good thing he's only 3 years old. If he were 17, this would be a real problem, and it wouldn't be on a blog post.