Double Dutch

Last night my daughter found the knitting measuring tape and unravelled it to make it into a jump rope. I am not sure where she got her excitement for jump roping, but she is so obsessed that every little string or rope like object is referenced to be a jump rope. She proceeded to hand my wife one end of the "jump rope" and hand me the other end. This was her first time actually trying to jump rope so naturally as we brought the rope around for her to jump over she just stood there and had a delayed reaction to jumping rope. When she did decide to jump it was a kind of awkward skip/jump type of motion that brought out the fact that she had never done this before.

It eventually came to the point where she wanted me to jump rope, so she took my end and my wife and her started to swing. They first smacked me right in the head cause my daughter is not that tall. Eventually it made it over my head and was slapped to the ground. When it hit the ground it came to a stop, so I, very awkwardly jumped/skipped over the rope that was lying on the ground, it was quite an embarrassing leap over the "jump rope." My wife proclaimed, "I can see where Maddie gets her form!!" (yes it was that bad). At that point a UK friend of ours who was there began to laugh, then Maddie, who was very excited that I jumped over the rope exclaimed, "Good Job Dad." Well this just made our UK friend burst out into more laughter, mainly because it was not a good job at all and also because apparently the phrase "Good Job" is not that common in the UK, especially when you didn't do a good job. In fact as a cultural difference, I guess we in the US tend to us this phrase as an encouragement, where the British would hardly ever use it cause they are much more into lifting themselves up rather then encouraging others. What a nice cultural lesson that came out of my awkward jump roping.