Thursday, August 24, 2006

Learning to Juggle

Okay, so I'm learning to juggle. Never done it before. I've tried and gotten to the 2ball thing but haven't been able to transition to 3. Mirror, at the Hollow, has taught juggling in the past and agreed to help me out. Okay, fine. I'm learning to juggle. My kid, of course, is going me one better and learning to pass clubs. Yeah. Here is the Mo Method for learing how to juggle:

Step one: locate professional juggler. Between the three faerie comms and visitors, this is the easy part. We are crawling with them.

Step two: when the juggler starts juggling (and they always do), run up with an abundance of excitement and jump up and down to get his/her attention. The juggler will throw something at you - jugglers find excited children totally irresitstable and -unless s/he is juggling something dangerous- will invariably toss an object to the child.

Step two and a half (optional): catch it

Step three: throw it back. Jugglers love this. They even seem to enjoy the fact that young, excited children aren't very acurate (like my spelling). They will play this game over and over and over.

That's it. The basic Mo Method. Its just a matter of her learning to catch, and she'll be passing balls and clubs. She'll probably be passing sickles and torches before she's done. Now we're talking about putting up a slack-line somewhere, so with that, juggling, and the trapeze (did I tell you we've been offered trapeze lessons this fall?) she'll be ready to go to circus camp in a couple years.

Seriously, though, my so-called "shy kid" astonished me at a party this summer by getting a juggler to pass clubs to her. She was out of her regular space and he was a complete stranger (and male, besides) - all things that generally will cause her to refuse to even make eye-contact. But There She Was! Talking happily to a wild hooligan with a bunch of clubs.

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