Wendi {at random}

It's official. Curt and I are brand spankin' new white belts at the karate school where Camden and Benjy have been working out. We go from the top down, we like to say. Curt's white. Camden's white. I'm white. And we even dance white. Benjy's yellow. He outranks us, and he's not the least bit humble about it.



Here we are with our favorite taekwondo teachers, the Dresklers. We miss their American Taekwondo Association, their easy-going-ness, their ma'ams and sirs and Bob and weapons. We miss that their ATA was in the same town as Chick Fil A, and that if we wanted, we could slur it all together to say Chick Fil A T A.




Camden became a black belt the very week we moved to Connecticut, where there is no Chick Fil A T A.

That was a special night when Black Belt Curt (dang, I wish his name was Bart) got to hug his own son, Black Belt Camden.




Benjy became a camo belt that week. His own brother congratulated him.



I became a red belt, one dingdang belt to go to black. It's an entire year from red to black, but it's quicker than going from white to red, which I had just done.

So we've started from scratch with a new martial art. The Dresklers aren't there, and we do miss them. I wonder if martial arts are like boy friends. The first one and all that.... We don't kick as much in karate, but we do kick. We punch a mean streak, though, and we still yell and carry on. We do push-ups. Well, they do push-ups. I do wimp-ups. And, one day, when we're not so brand new, we'll spar. And that's when I'm gonna pull this out of my arsenal and knock them all on their Yankee bottoms.