Yellow Belt

My husband and our kiddos tested for yellow belts in Tae Kwon Do last month.  With our daughter at swim team every weekday during the summer and then returning to competitive team gymnastics 12 hours a week the day after her last swim meet, it's amazing she found time to pass all the skills for the yellow belt. Her dad and brother go to TKD class several times a week, but she barely gets to go a few times a month.  Belt test day was held for several hours the same morning she has four hours of gymnastics, so she had to skip gymnastics to go to belt testing and awards.  Our family is entirely too busy, even after I promised myself before I ever got married that I would never let my kids do more than one extracurricular activity per week to preserve our sacred family time.  Why do kids' sports have to be so all consuming now?  I miss the good ol' days where once a week was plenty, and the rat race did not extend to the children's schedules.

Nonetheless, I am willing to invest time and money into life skills, and I'm so proud of the way my husband and children work together to learn discipline and self defense. I wish I had time to join them, but someone has to run the competitive gymnast and swimmer to all her activities, and my work and workout regimens are time consuming enough.  My favorite functional fitness workout is high intensity mixed martial arts training.

The highlight of their yellow belt test day and awards for me was the surprise of seeing my engineering professor, senior project advisor, and department head from college wearing a black belt and assisting with the testing.  I haven't seen him since I graduated.  He had tried to convince me to stay on as his assistant and pursue a graduate degree, and sometimes I wish I had stayed.  It was so nice to catch up with him.

I also really enjoyed watching the kids break boards with their feet.

My video camera went out during my son's board breaking, so I regret that I do not have video to share of him, but I'm sure there will be much thicker board breaking in his future.

  Here is some video of our boy performing the last two elements of the first phase of his test.

My video of our daughter breaking boards is fuzzy.  

Clearly, a career in videography is not in my future.

Here is their dad, breaking boards like a champ.