Karate

(The picture quality here is pretty awful. It's a scanned image of a digital print that wasn't that good to begin with and then I think they had it hanging on a wall somewhere for awhile before they gave it to us.)

 Stian's been doing karate now for awhile. I honestly don't remember when he started, but it's probably been almost a year ago now. The karate teachers come into school and for an extra fee the kids who want to take karate classes once a week. At first Stian claimed he didn't like it. He would ask us every week if he could quit. We don't really know what that was all about. We asked the director and assistant director at his school to observe him during class and tell us what they thought. Every week they would report back that Stian looked like he was having lots of fun during class. He was very enthusiastic and smiling and one of the more engaged kids in the class. So we persevered even though Stian kept asking us to quit.

Now he suddenly really likes it. He even says he wants to be a sensei when he grows up. This is kind of huge because usually he says he wants to be nothing or goose poop if you ask him what he wants to be when he grows up. So he must really, really like karate. The picture is obviously of him breaking a board. He's broken maybe 5 now in different ceremonies. I believe he has another board breaking ceremony coming up too.

Overall I've been pretty happy with the program. They teach them karate moves, but also life lessons like perseverance and respect and leadership. They also teach them about bullying, which is good. The part I'm not so crazy about is the stranger danger stuff. I wonder if that wasn't the part that was kind of freaking Stian out in the beginning. He worries a lot about "bad guys" and I think focusing on that was not the right thing for him. Of course he needs to know about the stranger danger stuff, but I think he's still a little young for it, and really, the vast majority of strangers he meets are nice people who would never harm him - no sense scaring the poor kid half to death at this point when he's never really away from a parent or teacher.