Dance, dance party.

I took the baby to the library yesterday for a play group that never materialized. One of T's friends made the plan and then neglected to tell anyone it was changed. But, no matter, I needed to get there anyway. We had five overdue movies and I wanted to be sure that my massive, scary book could be renewed because it is stamped all over "28 day book" and I am not even halfway through it.

It's just too scary.

T dropped us off and we went inside, he ran around for an hour before I admitted to myself that the rain was not going to stop and I needed to just suck it up and walk us home.

But first we paid our fine and hit the movie section.

We now have five of the seven Harry Potter movies in stock, but still not the first two. Great Neck baffles me sometimes. They finally had a copy of Beauty and the Beast, R has been waiting and waiting to see it. And then another new addition caught my eye.

Tangled!

The greatest movie ever made.

We took it home and watched it immediately. R has seen it before, with me, on my Netflix. And I have watched it on Netflix countless times.

But it's just not the same thing.

This morning after everyone was gone, I put it in and turned the volume all the way up. The baby and I spent the morning cleaning from room to room while Mandy Moore sang for us. We danced around and around until he was so tired he could barely stand.

This afternoon J brought his cousin home from school with him and they asked if they could watch Maximus the horse. OF COURSE!

We put it on and had another dance party.

T's mom came at 3 o'clock and I had my first Persian cuisine cooking lesson. I made raisin rice, which is the best thing to ever happen to rice.

Rice and I have a long, violent history full of bitter hatred and blatant disgust. Growing up I think my mom made rice six out of seven nights a week. It was a staple at our house, with tacos, with chicken, with beef, with EVERYTHING. Plain, white rice.

Several of my nieces and nephews prefer it to almost any other food in the world. Even the kids I care for now will eat three bowls of white rice before even trying one bite of any given vegetable.

But not me.

I hate the stuff. To me, it's like eating empty calories that taste like nothing, only worse, because this nothing has a grainy aftertaste. I used to douse it in salt and try to choke it down but most often I would wrap it into my napkin and throw it away, or dig a hole in the trash can an bury it way, way down hoping it never saw the light of day again. It was awful.

Since I have been rapidly nearing adulthood (almost there!) I have discovered that several of the foods I detested as a child are somewhat tolerable. Onions and olives made it from my black list onto my list of favorites. But rice hasn't had much of a chance to go anywhere. Not on its own.

But since getting in touch with my middle Eastern side I learned something about rice.

The expensive kind doesn't taste like the pan it was cooked in.

It tastes like long grain heaven.

And the way they mix it up with various spices and lentils and vegetables just makes me want to cry for joy. I don't now how to pronounce correctly, much less spell the names of half of these dishes, but tonight I learned how to cook my favorite one.

T's mom is so nice and she is a very funny teacher. She doesn't measure, as most cultures who pass down recipes from mother to daughter (or in our case mother to nanny) don't, and so we ended up with a double batch of the whole thing. After the rice was done, we hung out with the kids and showed her our dance moves.

We're pretty good booty shakers if I may say so myself.

And I do.