Crazy Sleeper

When Emma goes to bed each night she reads for awhile.  The other night I guess she decided that she wanted to read in her chair rather than in her bed.  She got up and dragged her chair over next to her bed so she could continue to use her lamp.  Later when we went in to check on her etc before going to bed ourselves, we found her asleep in her chair.  Silly girl!

Class A Chicagoland TKD Tournament

Yes, another taekwondo entry.  Another tournament.  There are tournaments held all over the country each year that are open for anyone to come and compete.  If we wanted to take Emma to all these tournaments we could, no matter where in the country they were being held.  The only real incentive to do that is if you are competing for state champion or something along those lines.  If that's the case, you get points if you win based on the size of the tournament.  The bigger the tournament, the more points.  Emma is not competing for any sort of title.  We just wanted to go for fun and to experience a tournament this size.  We found out about it when she was asked to go by a couple of her instructors.  Class A tournaments are the biggest ones.  That's based on the number of people competing.  Smaller tournaments would be called class B and so on.  Being in the Chicago area this one can easily draw a huge turnout.  We went with no expectations, just looking forward to the experience.

There were tons of people there.  They had between 20 and 25 rings for the competitors to compete in.  They had competitors from all ages and belt ranks, from 4 year old white belts to over 60 year old 3rd and 4th degree black belts, and perhaps even higher.  The highest ranking black belt in all of American TKD was there - a 9th degree black belt.  There is only one of them at a time.  He's getting pretty old though.  I still wouldn't want to fight him.

There were several different events each competitor could do, but being our first time at a tournament this size, we decided to only have Emma do 2 of them.  She would compete in forms and sparring.  Those two events were sort of a package deal anyway - you did one, you had to do the other.  They were running very late on their events (I guess they misjudged how long each group would take), and Emma didn't compete until about 2:00.  She was supposed to compete just after 11:00.  I'm really glad I took some snacks for her, because all they had there was greasy stadium type food.

Anyway, they were dividing all the groups up by sex into fairly close belt ranks and ages.  Because of how they divided them, even though she's only 8, Emma was in the 9-11 year old group consisting of brown belts and red belts.  That equals 4 belt levels, because there are two levels within each belt color.  There was only one other brown belt in the group.  The rest were all high red belts (Emma was a low brown - she's since passed her next belt test and promoted to high brown).  It was definitely going to be an uphill battle for Emma.  We just wanted her to have a good time and enjoy herself.  We don't mind Emma learning that you can't always win at everything.  The idea of participation trophies?  Yeah, I think that's a terrible idea.  At least by the time you're Emma's age.

Anyway, they did their forms first.  The way judging for forms works, is they have 3 people come up and each do their form, then all 3 together stand before the judges to receive their scores.  After that, everyone receives their score immediately after they do their form.  The idea here is to help give the judges some perspective.  If the first person were to receive a fairly high mark, but then all the other competitors do better, the judges might run out of higher scores to be able to award.  Make sense?  In any case, the order they compete in is completely random.  It's better to go later though, because the judges often tend to forget exactly how the earlier competitors did, and might award a higher score to someone who was not in fact any better.  It seems a little unfair, but it's all subjective.

Of course, Emma was called to be one of the first 3 girls.  Bummer.  She did awesome though!  But we were on pins and needles while the remaining girls went.  And they just seemed to keep coming and coming!  Every time I thought it was done, and that she had secured a third place win, another girl would still need to compete.  It was torture!  I don't know how people do this all the time!  Crazy!  Anyway, they finally finished, and although they didn't officially announce anything then and wouldn't be awarding trophies until after all the events were done for this group, we knew from the scores that Emma had won third place.  We were thrilled.  Especially since the 2 girls who took first and second were amazing.  The first place girl must do nothing else besides TKD.  Ever.


Emma waited until the last event, which was the sparring, before she competed again.  It is again done by random who you spar against each round.  Emma had the great misfortune of sparring against the girl who ultimately took first place in each of the 4 events.  So Emma was eliminated in the first round.  Had she sparred against someone else she might have been able to earn second or third place, but maybe not.  We'll never know.  In any case, it had been such a long day up until this point that I think Emma was just relieved it was over.

After the sparring was done, they called all the girls up and handed out the awards.  We were so thrilled that Emma won a trophy.  These trophies were huge too!  She was so proud of herself too.  Not too bad considering we went into this with no expectations.  Emma said she would love to go to another one of these, even if she didn't win anything.  She really enjoyed to experience.  Awesome!

Emma shaking the judges hands when they were giving out the awards.

Emma with a couple of her instructors, including the owner of
the school, who came down to support the competitors.

Valentine's Day

Holidays are always fun times to do anything that might be a little different to mark the occasion.  It doesn't have to be anything big either, that's what's so fun.  I actually think it's the little things that can make a holiday a success.  All this is of course for Emma's benefit.  Valentine's Day has never been a holiday that I've put much stock into.  I just don't care about it that much.  I don't need Eric to spend hundreds of dollars on a new diamond whatever for me, and I don't need ridiculously over-priced flowers (which are marked up just for the holiday) or chocolates (trust me, our home is never short on chocolate).  Eric is an amazing man and I truly feel blessed to be able to share my life with him.  He does so many wonderfully kind and selfless things all throughout the year for me that I wouldn't be able to document them all if I tried.  I have told him numerous times, specific to this holiday, that I didn't expect him or even really want him to worry about doing much, if anything, for me.  And I further clarified that I actually meant that - it wasn't a wife trap.  He knows I would likely be upset if he spent lots of money on some trivial thing for me just because of a holiday that says he should.  Now this is not to criticize anyone else for feeling different about this holiday or for buying and receiving gifts (of any value).  This is simply how I feel.  Typically the most we ever did (before Emma came along), was have a nice dinner (at a restaurant or at home - didn't matter), and just spend time together.  Not much changed after Emma was born.

This year, because of busy schedules etc, it took us over a month to actually celebrate our anniversary (which is in early January), and we ended up celebrating a week before Valentine's day.  I told Eric we should just count it for both our anniversary and Valentine's day.  Easy peasy.

Kids change everything.  And while I don't care much about the holiday, I still want to make it a fun and special day for Emma.  Anything to break up the norm, even a little.  So I painted her nails pink the night before with little red hearts on them.  We put a heart in her hair (which almost didn't work - her hair is too short!), and she chose a heart themed outfit, with socks that almost matched.  When she came out of her room in the morning she found a couple balloons and some goodies from us (just some candy and treats and her favorite chap stick).  Then I made her pink heart shaped pancakes for breakfast.

You can see some of the goodies she got on the bench next to her.  I have no idea why she pulling that face.

That evening we had a nice dinner at home with Emma's favorite chicken dish and some rice.  We lit some candles and played some nice music and used our fine china.  Eric did bring a few flowers home for us (some for me and some for Emma), which he always does, but they are not expensive ones.  Just simple ones.




After dinner we played some Mah-Jongg, which my family has played since before I was born.  We recently taught it to Emma and she is now obsessed with it.

Another TKD Tournament

Last Saturday we were able to go to another taekwondo tournament for Emma.  Her first tournament she participated in two events.  This time she wanted to do three.  She competed in Form, creative weapons, and sparring.  It is always so fun to watch her and all the other kids, but it's even better when Emma does so well.  I'm so proud of how hard she works at this, and you can tell she loves it.  She seems very grounded when it comes to these competitions.  She obviously would like to come in first place every time, but she knows that's not what's most important.  Her real goal is to do her best and to have fun.  And I wouldn't want it any other way.

One of Emma's strengths is her form.  She works really hard at being crisp and deliberate with her movements.  I love watching her do it.  This performance won her first place!  I should add that at the end of the video Emma just stands there for several seconds.  This is because the form ends at this point, but Emma forgot to look at the judges to let them know she was done, so they weren't sure.  It was kind of funny.

The new event for this tournament for her was creative weapons.  This is where you create a routine that shows your skill with one of the weapons.  She chose Ssahng Jeol Bongs (pronounced sahn-je-bons), but you probably know them as nunchucks.  Since taekwondo is Korean in origin, they use the Korean names for their weapons.  Anyway, she worked on creating her routine, and then performed it almost flawlessly.  And this performance won her first place in this event too!

Her final event was the sparring.  She easily made it past the first round, almost sweeping her competitor.  In this video Emma is the one with her back to the camera.

In the second round, she was unlucky in whom she was paired against.  She was paired against a kid who lives for martial arts.  He participates in just about every type there is, and is very good at all of them.  She gave it her all, but in the end lost the round.  Had she been better at her blocking, she probably would have won though.  When Emma goes to kick her opponent, her arms and hands often move to the side instead of staying in front of her continuing to block attacks.  Her opponent was able to very quickly get punches in barely before Emma's kicks made contact, which means he won the point.  We've told Emma she does this (forgets to block while kicking), but I think experiencing it and seeing the video from the tournament will help her realize even more she's doing it.  She plans to work on this.  In a way I'm glad she lost the round and is now able to see this, because I think in the long run it'll help her improve more.  So in that sense, maybe she wasn't unlucky in being paired against this kid. She ended up winning third place in the sparring.  I think she was just happy still getting a medal for it. In this video she is the one facing the camera.  And if you pause it right at the 1:52 / 1:53 second mark, you'll be able to see the final point scored against her, but a good example of how her opponent snuck a punch in barely before she kicked him.  You'll see her hands out to the sides.

As I said, I'm so glad that Emma has a good attitude about these competitions.  I'm glad she has a chance to lose too.  I think it's character building for kids to need to strive for excellence rather than always being handed an award or trophy just for participating.

Here she is receiving her medals from the judges.  Afterwards she just couldn't keep the smile off her face.  She was so proud of herself.

On our way home we ran a couple errands.  We went into the first store and not two seconds after we entered Emma professed that "It's really hot in here.  I think I'll unzip my coat."  She only wanted to show off her three medals she was still wearing.  I think it's hilarious that she was obviously planning to unzip her coat and show off, but tried to make it seem so nonchalant.  I love my silly girl!