Edgestravaganza

It appears as if our elf had a bit of a slumber party last night, a HOLLY JOLLY SLUMBER PARTY!  Our elf and a few guests had marshmallows for pillows and nice Christmas socks for sleeping bags!  I love the fact that there's a Christmas shrimp there.  It's from Bubba Gump, a Christmas shrimp we got from there some time ago.  He looks nice and snuggly there in his sock!

Speaking of socks, "The Twelve Days of Socks" continues for Daddy, with a new pair of socks each morning leading up to Christmas, each one with a Disney theme.  Today's pair:  Baymax!

It was a nice day at school and at work, rather uneventful, although Madison has been really into reading this book series, "Amongst the Hidden."  She's gotten the next book in the series at the school library, and has had her nose in the book ever since.

She's got a big math test next week, and this will determine her final grade pretty much, so she's going to be studying this weekend somewhat.  Other than that, all her grades are doing well, and she's been having fun with art club and Live to Give in the mornings as well.  She has stories to tell when she gets home, tales of adventures at school with friends and jokes and laughter, and things seem to be going just fine for our middle schooler.  It's not all about grades, and in fact just as important are her social skills, and she seems to be doing well.

Tonight was a big night at the taekwondo studio, something called "Edgestravaganza."  It was a few different things put together, all starting with a ceremony for the black belt students, or ones who earned a black belt in the year 2018.

This was just a glimpse into Madison's future, as it is something she hopes to achieve some day down the road.  It may be a while from now, but for the time being she's got her eye on that goal as well.  Once that ceremony was over, Madison was called up, and she wasn't expecting this:

She was given her camouflage belt!  So now she physically has her new belt, and she'll be proudly wearing that as she moves forward in classes.  There is actually another "rank camp" next week if she wanted to "level up," but she's got school next week, and on top of that, she's actually more in favor of the slow approach, taking her time and really absorbing everything along the way.

After the ceremonies, it was time for a Christmas party!

This is Madison with the Edges - she's holding her belt, and you can see how their uniforms have changed somewhat!  These are not official taekwondo outfits, by the way!

The evening was made up of different events:  the first being food.  But the kids had a chance to play bingo, and then there was the relay race where kids had to dress up their parents as a Christmas tree.

You can see Madison racing towards Mommy here, ready to put a star on her head.  The parents wore sweaters, and the kids had ornaments, garland and a star for the head, and the object was to get the most ornaments on the sweater by the end of two minutes.

Madison did great on this one, in fact she won!  As a prize, she won a ten dollar gift card, which was much appreciated, of course.  Here's a group shot of the three parents, and the Edges:

And here's a shot of just the parents and the kids.  This time you can see Mommy a little better.  The reason you can't see her face is because how Madison decorated her:  throwing the garland up there in a hurry, and just dangling off the hat and in her face!

Anyway, we had other games like Christmas trivia and a candy cane passing game, where you can't use your hands, but rather candy canes hanging from your mouth.  There were a lot of families here, and they all enjoyed the time together tonight.

The evening concluded with a reading of "The Night Before Christmas," as you can see here.

This was the poem that Daddy posted here a few days ago, the one they read for the kids.  It got a lot of laughs along the way, but it all rhymed and had a sweet sentimental tone to it, along with an explanation about something Santa left for everyone.

All the kids got belts tonight.  These were little portions of black belts on a keychain, with the word "Victory" written in Korean.  Madison got one along with all the other children who were there.  It was a nice souvenir of the evening.

It was a nice time together with the taekwondo family, an evening Madison enjoyed very much.  We all did, and I can tell we're all going to be happy as we continue on with martial arts.

Madison was getting sick tonight though, at the very end of it all.  Her nose was running and her cough was there, and we set things up tonight with the vaporizer and cough medicine and whatever we could do to help her sleep.  Hopefully she'll be okay in the morning, but we'll have to wait and see.  Fortunately, she was well enough during the event to have a great time.  She wouldn't want to miss that one at all.  And neither did we - it was great fun!