Thursday, April 25, 2013

Karate Video

As promised, here's the video of Lucas doing his thing at last Saturday's Little Dragons competition.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Karate Kid

Earlier today, Lucas had his first competition at his martial arts studio. Since he's in Little Dragons for another month or two, the rules were fairly simple. Each of the kids had to do a few different exercises--jumping jacks, push-ups, and crunches--followed by three types of kicks--front, side, and roundhouse--and wrap it up by showing off their flexibility by doing the splits. Afterwards, three of the black belts judged their technique, and then all the kids got trophies, with the top 3 getting slightly larger ones.

Lucas did a decent job though we would have liked if he had been a little more vocal. He was supposed to count out the exercises, but he whispered them. He also didn't yell out "ki-yah!" at the end of each kick set like they were supposed to, instead sort of mumbling it. Despite that, he did end up tied for 3rd out of the 10 or 11 kids that competed. The tiebreaker, with a girl from his kindergarten class, involved getting into one of the stances they learn and not moving. As you can imagine, at age 5, getting a boy to stay still for more than a couple of seconds in a challenge. We were impressed that he lasted almost a minute, but in the end he moved, followed by him raising his hands and letting out a resounding "yes!" Kind of ironic now that I think about it, since that shout was louder than anything he did during his presentation. Whatever the case, he still ended up with a nice trophy.

Below, I've included a picture from before the competition as well as one afterwards as Lucas poses with his new trophy. Marilu recorded his entire performance on the camera, but I haven't uploaded that yet. Once I do, I'll be sure to get it on the blog. In the meantime, enjoy these pics!



Monday, April 8, 2013

Easter 2013

You can blame my mom for the long delay between updates. She visited us over the Easter weekend, and when she is here, she doesn't pay attention to the blog, and thus there is no one to nag me about not updating regularly. However, she left last Tuesday so we're quickly approaching the point where I will hear from her so I thought it was best I get a new update up. And speaking of Easter, that's the theme of this one!

I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but at some point, Easter became a poor man's Christmas, from a commercial perspective. Every year, Lucas gets a basket with chocolate, but he also gets a bunch of presents. Maybe the same thing happened when I was younger--I can't recall--but all I have memories of are chocolate bunnies and other assorted bits of sugar. Whatever the case, here are the highlights of Lucas and Easter 2013.

It might have been a little last minute, but the night before Easter, we finally got around to coloring eggs. It doesn't appear to be one of Lucas's favorite activities. He has more fun mixing the colors until they are a soothing shade of brown/black.
 



No Easter is complete without an Easter egg hunt. Lucas had a great time searching for them, and once again, I was able to stay one step ahead of him and actually come up with hiding places he couldn't find without help. I'm sure that won't last too much longer.

 


Showing off the loot. (Quite literally, this year, as my mom got him a pirate chest.)



Feasting away on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! LOVE the faces, especially in the first picture.




Lucas's thank you note for the Easter bunny. Note the "eaten" carrot on the left.