Medals

This is how K and I spent Worldwide Knitting in Public Day (Saturday)... earning medals in Taekwondo! Didn't have time to knit.

We were up at 6.30 to be ready to leave at 7.30 for the one hour drive to Vernon. The morning was spent watching the younger/lower ranked competitors. As a black belt, I had my first experience of judging some boys performing their patterns and sparring. In patterns, there are five judges, in sparring there's a centre referee and four corner judges.

Later, K competed in his division, earning a silver medal in patterns. His group was split into heavy- and light-weights for sparring, which was good as K is on the light side. At the same time, I competed in my division - there were five women in my group. It was a relatively small tournament, so they grouped all the women red and black belts over 18 together (normally I would have been lumped with the "35 and better" women). I made a mistake the first time I performed my pattern, but did it perfectly the second time, and made bronze. I sparred two rounds, first with my friend from my own club, and later with a woman from Vernon. No medals there!

Once that was out of the way, I was free to judge the men's black belt sparring. That was great! The black belt men always compete last and a bigger deal is made out of it than anything else. It's somewhat sexist, I'm afraid. I loved the judging - I was a bit nervous about doing it at first, but I got the hang of it by the end of the day.

I was happy with my bronze medal, as I have had a painful health problem the last few weeks that I thought might stop me from competing, but I resorted to a couple of preventative painkillers and made it through okay.

R spent all day Saturday and Sunday in a First Aid course, renewing his certification. It's paid for by his employer, but unfortunately he has to do it on his own time.

And today we celebrated S's tenth birthday. Yes, double digits for my youngest son. Ten years ago today, my bedroom was set up as a birthing room. Two midwives were here to assist me. My oldest son was 6 at the time and was standing in the hall with my neighbour, who had been looking after him and my 3 year old while I was in labour, watching me give birth to his littlest brother. (I just reminded him and he said he doesn't remember it. Boo hoo! My neighbour certainly remembers it, though - she got more than she bargained for that night!) It was wonderful and definitely the best birth experience of the three (not that I had a bad experience with the other two, but this was the BEST)!

I didn't have to make cake - S said he wanted some mango coconut Good Karma rice ice cream instead, though I also bought the Mudd Pie and Mint Chocolate flavours. We had home-made sub sandwiches and strawberries dipped in melted chocolate too. A gift was easy - I took his wish list into ToysRUs and found a Lego set that he wanted - a Mars Mission set called Alien Infiltrator, which he just finished building and brought to show me.

Happy birthday, S.