black belt club

Zoo Boy joined the Black Belt Club at his karate dojo. This involved filling out several applications and sitting for an interview with the dojo's master. Now there are more opportunities available to him, including leadership training (which he very much wants -- being a Karate Instructor is currently his career goal), extra general training sessions, Family Tai Chi, special "just for fun" activities and events, and he gets to wear the special "blue" uniform with a "Black Belt Club" patch on it. Oh, and he joined the demonstration team. Oh, and he gets to start weapons training:

There he is, third kid from the left, during his first Bo Staff training class.

Life is good for the karate-obsessed Boy! And this adds a whole new level of chaos to our schedule, since he now needs to be at his far-distant dojo once or twice more a week than he was already there. Don't get me wrong, we are THRILLED that he's found his passion and will do everything in our power to make sure he attends everything he needs/wants to attend in association with this. But why oh why oh why did we decide to live so far away from everything our kids wound up wanting to do??

(The answer of course being that we never actually planned on having any kids, as much as that seems unfathomable now. This is a GREAT town for general living, and we love it and our farm. But if we could save just a fraction of the money we spend on gas and reclaim just an hour or two of the time we spend commuting...well, maybe we could have managed to live happily in a more centrally located area.)