JT's 10th Birthday

JT was given the choice to go to any restaurant he wanted to celebrate his 10th birthday. I expected him to choose Sakura's Japanese Steakhouse or Red Lobster since those are his 2 favorites. To my surprise he said, "I want to have breakfast at Aunt KD's house on my birthday, it's a tradition Mom!" Of course, I was thrilled because I could easily afford feeding everyone that way, plus, Aunt KD and Uncle Bobby would be the one's cooking and cleaning up!

So, per his request, we had eggs, bacon, sausage, cheese grits and waffles for his birthday "breakfast" dinner. It was the 3 of us, plus his Aunt KD, Uncle Bobby, Nana & Jenny.

I bought an ice cream cake at the grocery store. I was gone all day to a meeting and Nana had said she was going to bake a cake... but I guess she forgot, so I bought one instead. The icing was all messed up, but it still tasted good and he enjoyed it... which is all that mattered to me.

One of the presents he received for his birthday was the karate uniform he has on in the photo below. He's been wanting it for a long time, but since it wasn't cheap, we wanted to make sure he got to a point in his Karate that he would make use of it. It's called the XMA uniform.... which stands for eXtreme Martial Arts. He wants to start performing with the "Demo Team" and in order to do so, he needed to have this special uniform. He made all A's & B's on his report card, so part of his reward was earning half of the uniform... then we just surprised him and paid for the other half. We couldn't have bought him anything that would have made him any happier. He also got a new XMA bo staff that he's been wanting. All in all he had a great birthday. Money from his MiMi and Papa, and from his Great Grams, and his Great Aunt Bette (all in Michigan). He got a Walart gift card from his Aunt KD, Nintendo DS & shorts outfit from Nana, Dangerous Book for Boys from Jenny and a few Nintendo DS games from us.
Following is a video taken during class the day before his birthday where he got their traditional birthday spanking from the rest of the class.

The night before his birthday there was a huge Black Belt testing in the Jacksonville Veteran's Memorial Arena downtown that he wanted to go to. There were hundreds of black belts testing so we went down to see what goes on and to support the black belts from our academy. JT had a choice of wearing his white karate uniform or dressing nicely. He chose to dress in slacks, shirt and tie and was looking rather dapper! He carried his purple belt around with him and got it signed by Chief Master William Clark (8th degree black belt ... pictured below) and about 14 other people.

Here's a photo of JT and a proud looking Daddy! (In case you can't tell, JT fixed his hair himself... and used about a half tube of gel I think!)

As usual, no photos of me. Since I'm the one who takes the photos, I rarely get my photo taken.... but I was there. I have to work on doing better at getting Tim to take photos of me. I don't want JT to look back at photos one day and see that Dad was always there but Mom wasn't!

See More Photos at: http://picasaweb.google.com/rtungett