Clandestine Competence

For the past week or so, Dylan's Taekwondo teacher has been focusing a lot on....for lack of a better term, stealth.  I honestly don't know how stealth will help him in a tournament.  When I see them sparring, they're yelling and grunting and doing all kinds of stuff.  When they demonstrate their forms, they're whooshing their breath in and out, kicking, stomping...and at the end, they yell, "Huh!" really loudly.  One kid would yell, at the end of each of his forms, "HEIGHTSSSSSSSSSS!!"  It was the weirdest thing.  Everyone else yells, "HUH!"  And this one brown belt would yell, "HEIGHTSSSSSSSSSSS!"

Maybe the reason they're working on stealth is for the self-defense aspect?  Although stealth seems to be more of an offensive type of thing.  Who knows?  All I know is that Dylan goes to Taekwondo four times per week for one hour each time, and I like it.  He's out of my grill for four precious hours per week. And they talk constantly about respect, hard work, no drama, etc.  It rocks.  And Dylan really loves it.

So something their teacher was having them do, to see how stealthy they were, is have a partner face away from them.  Then they would come up behind them and jump really high and land as quietly as they could, and see if the partner could hear them.

Dylan has let me know in no uncertain terms that he is the stealthiest kid in the class.  (This may or may not be true; the kid has always thought very well of himself.  Low self-esteem is not one of his issues, that's for sure.)  He said that his partner has the "best ears in class - she can hear everyone jump... except meeeeeeee."

"You?" I asked, incredulously.  "You, of the hobbit feet?  You're stealthy??"

"Oh yeah."

"Well, maybe you can use these stealthy skills that you're honing at home."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, for instance, you could not stomp back and forth with your pizza-sized feet on the dining room floor early in the morning, which wakes me up."

He frowned for a minute and shifted his eyes back and forth.

"Um," he said doubtfully, "I think that may be too big of a challenge for me."

1.  I love that he used the word "challenge" in a sentence instead of boring old "hard."  That's my boy.
2.  Of course it would be a challenge.  Until his ADHD pills are in his system in the morning (which takes a good hour after I wake up [to the sound of stampeding up above], shove said pills into his hand, thrust a drink into his other hand, and stand staring at him until I see him actually drink the pills down), he is a one-man production of Stomp the Yard.  Or Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk.  Maybe even Rent.  Any of those raucous Broadway shows.  The kid is LOUD.