A New Martial Artist and Two Promotions

After years of encouraging her, watching her sister, and us just leaving her alone to make her own decision, Josephine decided to start TaeKwonDo in August 2014. She took a bullyproofing class that week at the martial arts school and decided to give it a try. We got her signed up.

She took her first class and had a blast!

She participated in the annual Harvest Home Parade as well.

Since that time, she was able to test for her gold belt (November 2014):

This past Friday, March 27, she then promoted to the gold belt with orange stripe.

Very proud of your efforts, Joie! We really have a couple of beautiful, sweet, and potentially lethal young ladies!

Rainbow to Black

After eight years of hard work, Livvi was promoted to black belt in Tae Kwon Do on November 1. Now the real work begins to truly learn the art.

The test was nearly 5 hours long (due in part to 5 other students going up with Liv and another going for her 2nd degree black belt).

The test included warm ups, forms, weapons, choreography, board breaking, brick breaking (note the concerned look on Joie's face above when Liv attempted to break a brick), sparring, push ups, sit ups, etc.

The students also had to write a black belt thesis paper. Heather got to read Liv's to the folks in the room. If you would like to read it, I included it at the bottom of this post.

Finally, after all that hard work (that day and the previous eight years), the reward came!

More pictures here.

Video Playlist (click the upper left corner (where it says playlist) to pick which video you want to watch):

Congratulations, Livvi (Miss Shaut)! We are so proud of you!

A Medal in Every Event

Last Saturday, the day after testing for her red belt, Olivia participated in another Tae Kwon Do tournament in Lawrenceburg, Indiana.

She entered every single event this year which includes weapons, board breaking, forms, point sparring, and olympic/continuous sparring. She did a fantastic job and actually placed in every single event she participated in.

She started the day off by placing first in weapons.

Her next event was board breaking, in which she placed 2nd.

The third event was forms, which she placed 3rd.

Before the event of the day was point sparring, in which she also placed 3rd.

Finally, to wrap up the day, she placed 2nd in continuous sparring.

It was a really good day for Olivia as well as the rest of her club, the Cincinnati Martial Arts Club.  Many of the 21 CMAC students walked away with a lot of trophies and medals.  Congrats to all!

Red (Belt) October

Last Friday night Olivia tested for her red belt in Tae Kwon Do. She did a fantastic job as you can see below from some of the pictures and the videos.

As her instructors told her, now the work starts.  The long, hard training towards her next belt: BLACK

Here are a couple of videos:

Congratulations to all the promotees, and especially our Olivia!