Alex's First Broken Board and the Black Belt Leadership Program

The day after Thanksgiving (Nov 25th), Alex broke his first board at Taekwon Do! He went to a 6 hour TkD camp and came home with this board! I couldn't believe it! He was so proud of himself. We are loving this school he is at. 

Note: If you live in Arizona and are interested it is on Bethany Home Road and 7th St  in Phoenix and it is called Arizona Kicks (www.azkicks.com). Just make sure you say we sent you if you decide to try it out! We get a discount for referrals! :) 

Way to go Alex! 

They have these re-breakable boards with different levels of resistance. They have the kids start out on those and then work their way up to being able to break a real board. They didn't have that when I was in Taekwon Do! Super cool!

After his first 6 weeks of Taekwon Do, they gave us the option of taking the regular Black Belt Path or the Black Belt Leadership Path. In the BB Leadership Program they get to go to an extra 2 hour class every Saturday and they learn and put into practice leadership qualities like honesty, self control, etc... They are required to put these into practice at home as well by doing Black Belt Behaviors (being helpful etc around the house) and then they earn stars as they do so. They also are given a lot of opportunities to learn self confidence in large groups as they will be asked, even at his young age, to call out commands to their classmates. There are other facets to it as well, but we talked a lot about doing this with Alex and he is determined that he wants to do it and commit to it completely. So, here he is with his new Black Belt Leadership patch and his Black Belt Leadership White Belt. Instead of having the normal solid colored white, yellow tip, yellow, green tip, green, blue tip, blue, red tip, and red belts as he advances, his belts will always be the color of belt he has earned with two black stripes on the outsides of it. This is to remind them of their goal to obtain their black belt. He was SO excited to get this belt and this patch.

Note: There are two other new posts for Alex and Rebekah's 5th and 3rd Birthdays below. Not much to see though....their pictures were mysteriously lost when I sat down to do those posts this morning. I cried a lot after searching for an hour for them in every possible place I could think of. So depressing. All I could find were these fuzzy ones of their cakes that I had taken with my phone. This is the second time in the last 3 months I have lost photos on my camera and I have no idea how! New camera please Santa!? Mine is eating my photos!