Taekwondo

At the swim school, one of our longest and most loyal clients name is Jojo. He starting swimming with us when he was 3.5 years old, now 6, and is still my favorite student to date. He is so adorable and sweet and SO good at swimming. His parents are THE nicest people I have possibly ever met, so gracious and sweet and I am proud to call them my friends:) Jojo stared taekwondo around the time he started swimming and he has been doing soooo good. He has some national titles I believe and in such a short amount of time! I don't know how it all came to be, but the space that the martial arts studio was at had to close down so Jojo's mom worked really hard and found a space and started their own martial arts studio and call it Jojo's Martial Arts Academy. They just opened and are offering trial lessons.

Kade has been in a really aggressive police officer phase for some time now. No matter how much we talk to him about it and explain a police officers role, though he understands, it is still fun for him to act like he's an officer arresting and shooting people and roughing people up. Not only is it the officer, but the football player(Kellan gets tackled more times a day then I care to count:) also. I have decided to try out taekwondo to help channel that aggression and help him understand how we use our bodies and for what purposes, and also to respect our and other peoples bodies. So we went to the trial lesson on Friday.

Kade has a little friend named Brayden who is my friend from growing up, Kaci's, son. Kade and Bray Bray tend to wrestle. I am the anti violence, anti-guns mom and unfortunately, Kade is allll about it. The thing with him and Brayden though is that they have big fat smiles on their faces and really love to play together. I'm trying not to be too anal about the whole thing and just let him be a boy...sighhh:)

Kade was excited all day to go, but once we got there he kind of shut down. Didn't want to move, take his shoes and socks off or do anything, just watch. Now if this was a swim class, I would put him in the pool and tell him that if he was going to cry I would be leaving. Usually the children stop crying after a couple minutes when their parents aren't around and it is great for them. With this though, it's a different environment, it's not a situation where a screaming kid is welcome. After about 45 minutes of watching and me trying to get him involved, he finally became interested enough to go and play with Brayden a little bit and eventually was working with the instructor.

The kids doing their kicks. Kade sat and watched with me. I love the one of Jojo looking a me. He's always makign sure Miss Lacy is wacthing him haha



Starting to get a little more excited while he watches


Warming up with Bray Bray finally!


Yay! He's talking to the teacher AND practicing with him. I'm so excited!




This is what I'm talking about. They start out with nice hugs...don't they look sweet...


Annnnnnnd then they knock each other down haha...its so bad! but SO cute! Kaci and I were like,"Boys, no no! Be gentle and nice....Oh wait, Lacy take a picture!" hahaha


Luckily we are going to do a few more trial classes before we decide on what we will do, but it is something that he has been asking about all weekend, so we will play it by ear:)