Reminiscing

Andrew had a private bo class last night and I got to appreciate how much he's grown. Space is kinda sparce for that class so I simply sit down in a corner and watch him and his instructor do their thing. I do learn a lot about stuff I could improve in my own kata, but mostly, I get to watch him do his kata over and over. He's improved a whole bunch in the last year. We started practicing the bo only a bit more than a year ago, in September 2005, and we entered our first competition in February 2006. Yesterday, I had a seat of choice to watch him and I remembered that first competition of his...


Crazy how he far he's come along, from that performance, where he gave it his best, to this show performance:


in about 10 months...

But then, I just came upon this little gem:


That's my boy, back in February 2004, as he was practicing his pinan 2 kata in our living room, in his pajamas, only maybe an hour before we left for the competition. His little brother Matthew was not even a month old back then. :)

That practice led to this performance in the competition a little later on in the day:


Andrew was a purple belt back then and while he didn't win anything in kata, he won one fight and came in second place out of three competitors in the 6 year olds intermediate underbelt category. Yeah, I was happy that he'd brought back a medal that day, mostly for him, so that he'd be encouraged to keep on trying, but I was even prouder of the fact that I felt he'd done his kata the best he could, without freezing at any time...

Here we are, almost three years to the day af those videos and we're getting ready to enter another one. I had a solid traditional class this morning. Cat 3 is the kata that I will present, but you knew that already. Was kinda funny today that some of the other people I regularly practice and learned the kata for the first time at the same time I did, were asking me to do it *with* me, to follow me. If anything, competing has given me some motivation to work on my forms, to try and learn them.

Andrew and I also had a semi private hour of class. Actually was the same as him and me both having separate half hour private classes, except we did turns of 15 minutes with our instructor. It's amazing how much one can learn when you have the undivided attention of one instructor. I again was amazed to see how much Andrew is improving. I'm proud of my boy, he's worked hard lately. No matter what his results are tomorrow, I know he's put in a lot of efforts.

Finally, some funny news regarding the Christmas show. just as we were getting to the dojo this morning, we met my Monday evening instructor. He told me that he was doing the editing on the show's DVD and that he had edited out my bo drop. At first, I thought he was joking, but he told me that it actually looked pretty good. He said I put myself back in almost the same spot after picking back up my bo and that it looks like I'm doing a move to the left, then go on to the right. Can't wait to see that. The DVD should be available on December 18 from what I heard...

FM