Belt tests, graduations and a realization

Friday night was wonderful! It was really incredible to be able to see my son receive both his black belt as a Young Warrior and his new uniform, complete with ORANGE belt! He's not starting all over! He knows two of the basic forms, so that qualifies him to be promoted to orange! I'm so proud of him! He really has tried very, very hard in his classes! We'll see how things go now that he's graduated. I'll be going to his classes with him for a while as they'll be at 6:00 on Mondays and Wednesdays. This means that he can now stay at Kids' Club full time! Woo hoo! He'll love that! It'll give him time to get help with homework during the school year. I like that idea.
While the Young Warriors and Little Ninjas were being promoted, people started arriving for the test at 6:00. Mr. M had me round them up and herd them off to the small room. Of course, I raced out of there after rounding people up and went back to the big room so that I could see Aidan get his belt and his uniform.
We had something like 55-60 people there for the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced test. I was testing with the other Cho Dan Bo's for our CDB1, then we had four people testing for Cho Dan Bo and everyone else was advancing. I had to cheer very loudly for three people who went from white to Yellow belts because they're in the Adult class and they all have been working VERY hard!
Board breaking. I tried three times to break a board with a front snap kick and just could NOT go through the board!! One of the dads came up to me afterwards and asked if my foot hurt. You can say that! It was hard trying to put the ball of my foot through a stubborn piece of wood! I even tried my elbow and just didn't get it! I finally wound up breaking a smaller, thinner piece of wood. I wanted to break the one I started out with but it wasn't in the stars last night. Oh well. I have all summer to practice for my black belt test and that WILL have the harder wood, I'm sure!!
This week we start our Summer schedule. I'll take Aidan to school, drop him off, pick him up after work, come home, go to class, watch him and then I'll get ready for MY class. Tony will pick him up from his classes while I'm in mine. It's possible that Amanda may join the classes too, but we'll see. Our school is family oriented. I would love to have my entire family involved but this is my obsession, not theirs. Aidan so far is the only one who is truly interested in it like I am. He's looking at it from a different perspective though. I originally joined these classes to lose weight and somewhere along the line, it hooked me and I've developed a true love for the sport. If you liken this to school, it's rather like going to college. By the time I get my black belt, it would be the equivalent of graduating college. Okay, maybe that's not the right thing to compare it to because I know that college is/was a lot harder than this is, but when you start out to do something that requires this commitment, it's pretty close.

Amanda and Tony went out to see Pirates of the Caribbean yesterday. I wanted to go but didn't. I got up at 5:30, got myself dressed and ready for WW. Skipped weighing in (I had a "get out of jail free card, basically), but attended the meeting. The meeting was worth it. I heard a lady in the meeting say that she'd just come back to meetings after falling off plan because she was getting seriously frustrated. Our leader sends cards and emails to encourage us, so that's a good motivator too. Mollie said that she came back and is working on not getting frustrated that the weight isn't magically melting off. Another member said the same thing and I realized that I'm not alone--I thought that my 31 pound loss in 9 months was a bit too slow, but...it's not!! It's actually fairly normal for some of us. This is something I need to keep in mind the next time I get irritated with myself about my perceived lack of progress. It may be a slow loss, but it means I'm more likely to keep it off than to put it back on.