Porkbuns

It’s about time I sit and catch up the blog a little bit. A new year has started and stuff like that, so it was about time to get something posted up here.

It was a great year for everyone. New beginnings (the oldest daughter turned 18 and pretty much got out on her own), new endings (dad lost 50 lbs.), steady as she goes physical fitness (BunBun is a blue belt with a red stripe in Tae Kwon Do)… and of course, the youngest is growing like a weed. She’s 3 years old and within 5 inches of catching her brother’s height. Don’t ask us how that happened.

Dad finally left NASA and started a new job at a small company by the name of Summit 7 Systems. It’s a great little company and he’s having an absolute blast.

BunBun started 2nd grade this year and is knocking grades out of the park. All of his report cards have been straight A’s and his Accelerated Reader work is outstanding. His love of reading has really flourished. His creative mind is really hopping.

MeiMei, as I said, turned 3. She started preschool and absolutely loves it. Her smarts, attitude, skills and maturity is great to watch. She’s a lovely little girl. She totally loves “Olivia” the show and is currently in the “I’m a Princess!” stage. Actually, she refers to herself as “Princess of the Queen.” We’re not sure where she picked that one up.

The oldest sister is working almost full-time and is a full-time student. She’s working VERY hard and cleaning house with grades. She is doing an outstanding job. She has hooked up with an awesome young man by the name of Mike, whom we’re very happy to have as part of the family. He fits right in – he’s a gamer, he’s a computer lover, quite creative and snarky as hell. He’ll do well with us.

Mom has lost an amazing amount of weight as well and is feeling great, looking good and livin’ life.

Moving on to 2012, there are new adventures awaiting, for sure. There’s plenty more to come and when it happens, I’ll get it posted here… uhh, relatively soon after it happens.

On the last weekend of June, our son participated in the Tae Kwon Do competition at the Alabama Sports Festival. 150 students competed for medals in forms and sparring matches. Our son entered both, mostly at our behest, of course… because, you know, kids these days… if left to their own devices… would probably do nothing.

But this boy not only overcame extreme nervousness for engaging in his first competition. He also fought off an on and off temperature to stand up and give it his all. He competed in both the forms and sparring.

The end result was an amazing victory. He took a silver medal for his form (Taeguk 5 Jang) and a bronze for sparring. He took at least four kicks to the head but still chased his victim around the mat. He did not let up the pressure on the boy. The opponent was also taller than him so the headshots were almost free hits.

We’re working to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Our son is learning to use his size, speed and agility to get around those attacks and follow them up with a strike.

Mark our words, future opponents… that won’t happen again

We could not be more proud of our son. He is nothing short of inspirational. Congratulations, Bun!

Mother’s Day thought: Without my wife, mother of my children, my kids would probably be:

• Overweight and gorging on chocolate all day
• Still sitting around in diapers
• Skipping school and getting into trouble
• Sitting on the computer, in diapers and eating chocolate all day
• Drinking sodas
• Likely diabetic
• Cursing every other word
• Unable to read
• Stealing cars in downtown
• Burning down my house (and my neighbors’)
• Torturing small animals
• Writing "FART" on the paneling (nod to the Coen brothers)
• Sitting around, at the computer, in diapers, eating chocolate all day with hand down the front of pants and burping every 20 minutes.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you women who keep the fathers in check.

He finally did it. Bun’s Taekwondo journey has led him to the blue belt!

At six years old, Bun has impressed just about everyone with his strength, determination, focus and skill. He is learning so much in Taekwondo. We couldn’t be more proud.

The journey to the red belt begins. Savor the victory, son!

To see a little video of the action, visit this link.

On this day, our six year old son received his third blue stripe in Taekwondo. As you can see from the photo he’s rather happy with this development.

Bunbun has worked extremely hard on TKD and we’re hoping he’ll get the nerve to enter the tournament in June. We’ll see how it goes. His courage wavers to and fro.

Regardless of his participation in the tournament we’re quite proud of his achievements!

There’s absolutely no point in this blog post except to point out how cute my kids are.

No point whatsoever.

Perhaps I will also take this time to declare that I am jealous of this cuteness.

I’m marking this day because this is the day that we drove up to Chattanooga and introduced our son to the world of the Taekwondo tournament.

Our son has been engaged in Taekwondo lessons for about a year and a half now. He is doing quite well in the class. His instructor has mentioned several times that he’d like to see him compete in his age group but BunBun reacted as he usually does – severe trepidation.

As parents this is something we’re used to, I suppose. BunBun has always approached new experiences slowly and carefully. We took the time to drive up to Chattanooga to attend the tournament and cheer for our home team even though our little man didn’t enter.

The strategy appears to have worked as our son has decided he can “take those kids down.” He plans to represent Rocket Taekwondo at the summer tournament in June.

Stay tuned, you know we’ll be documenting the results!

The snow started about 8:30pm last night. Once it started it didn’t stop either. There were reports of 2-4 inches within an hour. The storm was serious. It was so serious that it was doing the “thundersnow” thing. Yep, thundersnow. I was sitting here in the home office when there was a flash of blue light in my window. Was it aliens? No, it was lightning… followed by thunder. Second time in my life that has ever happened.

This morning we awoke to massive amounts of snow. It’s nowhere near as bad as Maryland this time last year but it has certainly scared the crap out of this town.

After breakfast, everyone put on multiple layers and hit the yard. The snow was packed well and made for some awesome snowball fighting. BunBun has truly honed his snowball skills. His aim is quite good. Now we just need to convince him to lay off the headshots.

Before the snow really kicked off we had put a bowl out to collect snow for snow cream. This morning the bowl was missing – buried under 9” of snow.

The day was certainly a blast. Mother started a wonderful snowman with two perfectly-shaped boulders of snow. She gave up after the second one as the little girl needed to go inside. The boys made a valiant effort to finish it but alas, it was just too hard to get a perfect shape on top of his head as well. (Memory footnote: A local law firm had a snowman contest. We didn’t enter because we were just too tired).

The snow was so well packed that we began to confer with the neighbors on an idea for a sled. The neighbors have a 4-wheeler and they like to use it. The first version of the sled was a simple box with the rider holding the chain. All of those lat pulldowns came in handy, but it was quite painful.

While we went inside to eat lunch and let the littlest one take a nap, the neighbors worked on a design proposal for version two of the sled. He came up with a wonderful contraption made out of a steel ladder and a slab of wood that was firmly attached. While we were scarfing on lunch we noticed that they were trying it out but alas, the design was flawed. It allowed for too much snow onto the board with the rider.

A simple design modification was in order. The other neighbor sought a recycle bin and it was placed in the front of the sled. Victory! The sled was 5 feet of awesome. The afternoon was spent sliding around the streets on a sled big enough for three people. The video evidence is here at the family podcast if you like.

What about the snow cream? Well, we found the bowl and dug it up. The wife subjected it to the sugar, milk and vanilla and mixed it all together. IT WAS A BOWL FULL OF AWESOME.

It was a fabulous day for all involved, indeed. What’s the best part? The schools are still closed tomorrow so there’s another day of fun ahead.

Oh, and Verizon has some kind of awesome announcement tomorrow. This week just can’t get any better so far.

It’s probably worth mentioning the fact that this snow event was apparently the third largest snowfall in our town’s recorded history. Only the third… but if it had snowed just another few inches, it would have been the worst. It was certainly far more snowfall than 1993 and well… those of you who know me well know about my memories from THAT snow event!

What a fantastic day.

The first child stirred at about 6:45am. He went to view the evidence. It was clear that not only had Santa visited, it was snowing… and it was snowing hard.

As a matter of fact it snowed almost all day. It was a huge, packed, wet snow and it made for one seriously epic snowball fight. There was a snowman in two yards and a snow penguin. We didn’t do the fort because we all got cold, but people got hit with some seriously nice snow meteors.

There were massive amounts of presents for everyone. Taitai made an awesome dinner with turkey breast, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes, stuffing, corn souffle, cranberry sauce and a very yummy caramel apple pie.

What an awesome day. It would have been absolutely perfect if it wasn’t for one personal issue with the little boy, purely of which I am mentioning here for documentation purposes only.

Oh, and dad spent three hours on a single Lego set – the Boba Fett ship. Backside hurts. Bad.

The compilation of pictures can be found here. Merry Christmas! Only one week left in 2010!