Today I drove up to Irvine to watch my two favorite nephews in their first ever karate tournament. Wow...karate; let's hear it for martial arts in a giant auditorium. The Mr. Miagi comments were swirling around in my head so fast I had to sit down. My little 4-year-old nephew had been up since 5am so by the time came for his form competition came around he was a very angry dragon. There were so many white and yellow belt midgets in his category that they had to split up the group and by the time that happened we were 20 minutes into it. When the judge finally did call his name Mikey runs over to him slapping his own head and making faces (where did he learn that? Not his auntie welfare that's for sure) He does his blocks and whatever's and everybody claps and he sits back down relieved he doesn't have to do that anymore until we remind him he still has to spar. Oh no, Mikey is not going to stand for smacking around another 4-year old, even though he lives for smacking other kids when he's not suppose to; I guess when you don't have a nap you turn into a pacifist. Needless to say there was not a second trophy for Mikey today. All he had to do was to step into the ring with his new cup and hit another kid. Oh well there's always next time. Tommy came in third in his form and actually beat a kid sparring; woo hoo that angry Irish blood does a kid good.
The one thing that made me mad was that they stopped all the little kid stuff so that the sensei's could perform a weapons' demo. So for 45 minutes we had to watch guys in their pajamas dance around with swords and yell Chinese words that I'm sure were dirty. Next time let the guys actually do full contact weapons demo on eachother and make the hour drive worth my while.
