In January 2015, after a couple years of begging on CootieBoy’s part, I finally signed him up for taekwondo. I’ve posted over half a dozen times since then about his dedication to become a black belt. I had some doubts as to whether he’d stick it out and stay committed. And yet here we are, 1328 days later (or 3 years, 7 months, and 20 days) – and my son is now officially a black belt in taekwondo.
Saturday was a long day (we left the house at 10:00 a.m. to get there at 11:30 a.m. for practice. Practice consisted of figuring out how the kids would be grouped together, as well as placement on the mat during testing. That ran from 11:30 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. because there were at least 80 people testing for black belt (1st Dan through 4th Dan). We finally broke at 2:00 p.m. and took CootieBoy to get some food.
At 3 p.m. testing finally started, with forms coming up first. CB had to show high proficiency with three forms, which he did really well. But getting all 80+ people through three forms each took forever – it didn’t finish until 5:30 p.m. At that point we began self-defense. Each tester had a brief “routine” that showed off 4 self-defense skills. CB was paired with a black belt from our school, and ran through the paces very well. Some of the pairs were really funny to watch because they over-acted quite a bit. One adult pair from our school was hilarious and I so wish I had recorded it. Surprisingly, the self-defense portion only took 30 minutes for all 80+ students to get through, so we quickly moved on to board breaking.
Once again, students had to show three skills. Some of the younger kids were so sweet to watch – a couple of them had trouble breaking their boards because they weren’t putting their full energy behind their strikes, and it resulted in some tears along the way. But what I love about our group of schools is that we all encourage the students. If they don’t break the first go round, the entire crowd begins cheering and clapping until they do – whether it takes one more strike or ten. And once the board breaks the crowd goes nuts, screaming and applauding as though the kid broke it on the first attempt. I teared up several times on Saturday because of that lovely display.
The three skills test done, it was time to hand out the black belts to all the students – I could tell that CB was so proud as he put on his new shirt and stood as our school’s master tied the new black belt around his waist. Denis and I are very proud as well.
