Tiger Challenge

Silent River's Tiger Challenge was on Saturday, and as always it was a great event. I only participated in one event this year since I'm letting myself heal up, but I got a chance to help out more with score keeping etc. Both of my daughters are in kung fu and they were really excited about the tournament. My youngest daughter is 7 and she's a little firecracker. We always talk to the kids about how winning isn't the point of competing etc etc, and they always nod their heads and agree and say "we know mommy". But Teagan really likes winning, so she just says these things to make me happy, since she hasn't ever lost anything. So this year Teagan is in a group that has a bit of a wider range of ages and maybe she didn't practice as much as she could have. She went through all four of her events and didn't place. She held up pretty well and had good sportsmanship, but when I asked her if she was ok there were some tears. Every kid gets a participation medal, but she felt the loss of those gold medals of previous years. By the end of the day she had totally forgotten about not winning her events and told us what a fun time she had. There were so many people that told her what a good job she did and were a positive influence on her. She got to run around and play with a group of kids from the club after the kids events were over. The great community and positive atmosphere of Silent River made that day awesome for her, once again I am grateful to be a part of a club that promotes such a healthy outlook for it's big and little members.

It's just a dummy, dummy

Today is my last day off and sometimes I almost don't enjoy the day off knowing that tomorrow it's back to the same old same old. But today Adrien and I went shopping for dummy materials. Adrien wanted to make a grappling dummy to practice techniques on. It was actually kind of fun and it took about an hour to make a somewhat lifelike practice dummy. As soon as the kids walked in the door from school they pounced on the thing.... I almost feel bad for this inanimate object. Half the time they want to pretend it's a prince or their future husband and the other half they're kicking him in the head and doing body slams on him. What a life. I feel a little sorry for myself too. I walked into the computer room to blog and my heart jumped into my throat because the stupid thing is sitting in the computer chair with it's bag glove hands on the keyboard "typing". Adrien just killed himself laughing and says he's been sitting there with butterflies in his stomach waiting for me to go in there and have a heart attack. He's having way too much fun with this thing! Cheers till next week.

Unexpected hiatus

So I am taking a break from sparring for awhile. I did something gnarly to my leg in San Shou and I guess I've finally realized I need to let myself recover. It's so easy to tell someone else that there is no shame in taking time to heal and not to worry about what other people think when you can't do everything that the class is doing or to train as hard as everyone else. It is so darn hard to take my own advice it's literally painful. I had high hopes to spar in the upcoming tournament. I love sparring, and I work hard at it but I just don't know if I'll be ok by then. I always have the idea that I'll go and just take it easy, but that never happens. I feel like a horse, chafing at the bit, I just want to go but I can't.

Most boring post ever, no really.

As always, I have been sitting here trying to think of what to blog about and I still haven't come up with anything, so I'm going to talk about my feet. Feel free to stop reading now, I won't be offended.
The sad condition of my feet has further deteriorated over the past two or three weeks, culminating in me roundhouse kicking the plastic base of the heavy bag with a good amount of force last week. I should add that I didn't do this on purpose, in case you were wondering. Of course I was kicking with the top of my foot in order to save my injured toes and ball of foot. So my entire foot is now a mess. I am pretty sure I have plantar fasciitis in both feet, so I'm wearing my runners to work instead of steel toe boots. Hopefully that won't backfire and the title of next weeks blog won't be I got stepped on by a 1300 pound horse. I finally broke down and bought some martial art type shoes to wear while I'm training. They seem OK, except I have a tendency to trip while walking on the mats. I'm sure in time this will be funny to me and not just other people. So here's hoping the shoes help, and I apologize for such a lengthy blog about my feet.

The old weight on your shoulders

So it's the beginning of the fourth month into 7. It has become a way of life for my whole family. I was walking to the park with my kids and my older daughter spotted litter on the side of the alley and without missing a beat grabbed it and threw it in the trash. I know this is because she sees me doing this and it's nice to see such concrete evidence that they learn from what they see us doing.

In the past few weeks I have realized that I tend to hang onto negative thoughts or things that happen throughout the day. For example, I was at a store and there was a woman on a cell phone trying to get her shopping cart through a door with her kids in it, the door was slamming shut on her cart so I ran over and held it for her. She in no way acknowledged me and I thought to myself that that was kind of rude. Then I told my sister about it and we ended up talking about rude people. It ended up being quite the discussion about all the people that do things like that and how horrible they are. I don't want to be the person who's always whining about the people who don't say thank you etc. Negativity breeds negativity.
My kids had a book from the library with a bunch of short stories in them. One was about an old monk and a young monk walking in a busy town. A young lady dressed in her best and carrying many shopping bags runs into a large mud puddle. The old monk runs over, puts her on his back and carries her over the mud. She sticks her nose in the air and walks away with no word of thanks. The old monk and the young monk finish their business and continue walking. Young monk is fuming at the behavior of the young lady and finally says, aren't you angry that she treated you that way after what you did for her? Old monk says I put her down hours ago, why are you still carrying her?
So here's to putting down the things that I don't need to hang onto anymore. Cheers.

The big stuff and the little stuff

I was in a big slump last week and I finally made a really big decision that I have hummed and hawed over for a long time now. I'm going back to school. This will be a big change for me and my family. I won't be working and my kids might have to be in early morning child care. It's kind of scary but in an exciting, top of the roller coaster kind of way. I am happy with this decision, and I feel good that I am working towards a career for myself.

The forms marathon was good, I did 99 forms in my 2 odd hours at the kwoon. My knees are really feeling it today. It was cool to be a link in that unbroken chain of forms. This reaffirms that it really doesn't take long to get in 5 forms a day.

We grappled in San Shou this week. We learned a mount escape and then our challenge was who could reverse positions fastest. I worked with Mr. Krebs and also fought him for my challenge. He got out of my mount in 15 seconds which kind of bummed me out, I figured there was no way I'd beat that. So on the bottom I couldn't pull off the mount escape we learned, but then for the first time I actually remembered something WHILE I was rolling and thought, hey, he's all tied up here so I trapped and rolled... and there it was 13 seconds! So in a very unsportsmanlike manner I jumped up with a big yahoo and my arms in the air, after which I apologized to Mr. Krebs for doing so. It was awesome to actually pull something off. So what if it's the first thing you learn grappling! So until next week, cheers.

I'm glad I went

It's been a catch up week for me, my numbers aren't 100% caught up from vacation but I'm getting there.
I have missed a lot of my san shou class in the past month and a half. I hate to admit but doing traditional san shou with a bunch of guys took it's toll on me and I took a class off. I was gone for two weeks and last week I finally went to class. I had a terrible day, I was so sore and I didn't want to be there. I've never had a bad class but this one was exactly what I needed. Lots of sparring drills with a partner to get warmed up before our matches. My partner made me laugh and I felt looser than I had in a long time. I guess if you don't fight it sounds weird to say how relaxing it can be to punch and kick someone and especially to take those hits too. Getting a little banged up was just what the doctor ordered.