Yay! Orange Belt

I have beach pictures to share but I absolutely had to post these first! Autumn got her orange belt and she did a fabulous job. She had to do some extra training to get all the elements down. A couple of piece of footwork gave her some trouble but she knocked it out of the park on test day. She had to demonstrate two versions of one technique in addition to basic footwork, strikes, etc. and it's one of the harder ones. I think we learn it first because no one ever really masters it, ha! Of course, I just say that because it's one I still have trouble executing on certain people. This is the version where you move to your partner's front.

And it ends in a pin. Look at that posture and those cute feet!

This is the back version and it's fun because your partner ends up kind of flying around like a helicopter blade! Stephan took these pictures and I am so excited that he got this one. It's excellent ukemi on Jeffrey's part and Autumn looks good. Her knees should be more bent than her back but, seriously, this is fantastic.

And this is one happy student. She was so excited about her test that she put on her uniform and belt before lunch time! She's lucky we're in summer uniforms or she would have had to wear the jacket around! I found out that Jeffrey was pumped, too. He wore his uniform to get a hair cut. I love it. Autumn hasn't always loved aikido and not every day is as great as this one, but I'm glad we were persistent and kept at it. I don't want to *make* her do martial arts but so far my plan of making it casually part of our life is working. Perhaps not forever but for today and hopefully long enough to give her some good tools. As a side note, I have no idea why my uniform is so scruffy. I blame it on the preschoolers!

Other than testing, last week was a full week! We had swim lessons with Mrs. Christy and we rescued a doggie. Autumn has been playing Nintendogs on my old DS and she was absolutely thrilled to get to walk a dog for real. I know she was hoping that we'd never find the owner but with some detective work we did. The dog had on a LEASH (so dangerous!!) but no tag. I called our vet to see if they could scan for a microchip if it came to it. I would have also had them bathe the dog because he was, while adorable, smelly as all get out. I walked around a bit asking people if they'd seen someone walking the dog and ended up at a stretch of apartments across from where we found the dog. We were looking for a yard with dog things when the owner came our whistling. She seemed alarmingly unconcerned that her dog had been wandering with a leash on across a busy parking lot. :( But, Mike is just glad we didn't have to bring the dog home!

Speaking of animals, Autumn is a cat. She's sitting in the cat bed the our friend Amy gave us. Her cat wouldn't sleep in it. Molly won't either. But Autumn uses it to look out the window. We had a random, terrible storm blow through Wednesday. We watched it come in until Autumn got nervous and then we did some chores to take her mind off it.

This is just cute.

I believe that's it for now! Next week we'll have beach photos and some long lost Uncle Brad! While we were gone I think Molly realized that the betta fish is a real, live fish. I don't know if this is going to end well but at least I didn't throw away the lid. Molly was watching the fish HARD this afternoon. Autumn and I laughed about it and then she said, "Are you getting a nervous feeling?" Hahahaha.