Magnetic People

Do you know someone who's just magnetic?  They're the person that everyone turns to look at all the time.  They have just the right smile, a friendly look about them, maybe they're attractive or there's just something ineffable about them that makes people want to look at them, listen to them and be friends with them?  I met someone like that today.

My daughter started Kindermusik this week and this morning was our first class.  You dance and sing with your baby and the babies just love it.  They sway back and forth, they rattle the bells and laugh at the bubbles and they get a good foundation of music and rhythm.

In general, there are mothers or grandmothers in these classes with the children.  We had twelve babies and thirteen parents today.  One family had both a father and a mother with their son.  Initially, this man walked in, with no baby.  The instructor greeted him and introduced him to the class. I wondered if he was an instructor in training.  Shortly we introduced ourselves and he said his wife and baby were out in the waiting room, waiting for  his son to wake up. 

This man was the magnetic person about which I'm writing the post.  First, he looked a lot like Orlando Bloom, so he was nice to look at.  But he just looked happy and friendly.  He had an easy voice and was very outgoing in a caring, sort of kindergarten teacher kind of way.  We all know it's easy to look at someone attractive, but there are lots of attractive people out there and they all don't capture my attention like this guy did.  Yes, he was the only man in the room, but that wasn't it either.  It was the combination of everything that can be summed up as "charisma."  This guy had more charisma than three regular men.

Later, his wife came in with a cute little chubby boy.  I don't think the wife said two words, if any, during the class.  But he did.  He was nice to the other little girls and boys that crawled or walked over to him.  He asked my daughter if she could please teach his son to crawl.  And throughout it all, I found myself trying to not look at him more than any of the other, very nice mommies, who were saying and doing the exact same nice things.

So charisma.  A powerful thing.  And there is the opposite too.  There's the anti-magnetism.  There was a lovely mother with a very cute daughter that was a delight in class.  But the mother had one eye that looked, rather drastically, in the wrong direction.  It took me three times looking at her—and feeling like I was rudely staring each time—to determine which eye was the proper eye to look at so the strange feeling of lack of eye contact would go away. 

The Big Boy Update:  Ice!  He likes ice cream.  But he can't say "cream" so he says, "ice" repeatedly.  Yesterday after lunch we started walking down the sidewalk towards the frozen yogurt place we frequent.  He started saying, "ice ice ice!"  When we left, he waved at the store and said, "Bye bye, Ice."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Kindermusik.  She's not shy.  She crawled all around the room, sat in the middle of twelve children and parents, shook the shakers, made a friend named Ty, who was so fascinated with her white hair that we dubbed them boyfriend and girlfriend by the end of the class. 

Fitness Update:  Weight Up.  It's so hard to gain weight.  Mentally that is.  Physically?  Bring on the ice cream and milk shakes.  I'm up a few pounds from my lowest, and target weight.  But I have these calf muscles and thigh muscles and abdominal muscles and probably butt muscles that have been being built over the past several months that I'm trying to think of the weight gain as proper and appropriate and not overindulgent.

 Someone Once Said:  The human body is often pleasing, frequently depressing—and never significant per se.