Screw Ballet!

Today Noodle is going to a Ka Pua class. It's a form of martial arts and it's for 5-12 year olds and it is at the YMCA near our house. This is the second thing we are doing to get ready for school, which starts in 9 days. The first thing was getting her up before 9 am since school starts at 8. Today she was at pre-school at 8 am and even had 15 minutes of play before we left. It was hard, we figure she nees to be woken up at 6:45 and she is not a morning person, Monster Tasmanian Devil maybe, but not a person. She is really a crack of noon kind of child. Hubby spent 5 years developing her ability to sleep late and now we have had to retrain her to much earlier.
She will be in an afterschool program when school starts but we thought she may want to take a class too so we decided to talk with her about what she wanted to do:
Tap dance? No
Gymnastics? maybe
Swim? No, she feels she already knows how to swim so what is the point.
Soccer? maybe.
Piano? no
Spanish? no no no
Karate? yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. (visions of my sometimes violent child whip through my mind: will she karate kick kids at school, karate chop the cat, the mom, the dad, the dog?).Then Postcards from Buster came on and it was about Seattle and there is a lot of kids eating sushi and doing martial arts. Noodle immediately saw the similarities: she eats sushi, she has a cousin that is asian, she should learn karate. I want to see this Buster but that may never happen.
Finally I asked whether she wanted to take Ballet? Screw ballet!

Ok, she didn't say that but if she knew what screw meant, she would have said it. She acted like she was going to sick up at the premise of taking ballet. So we will try karate tonight. Let's hope she uses the knowledge for good, not evil. I emailed a friend who is a second degree black belt about the type of karate Noodle will be attending and she (who slinks, she doesn't walk, she slinks) said it's all good, it's great for kids and adults. My friend then felt her dojo should make up pink t-shirts that say 'screw ballet.' I told her I take a medium. Now Noodle is a kind of girlie girl: she likes pink and playing with Polly Pockets and wearing skirts and stuff like that but she is also very athletic so I think she will like it, especially since she gets to dress up for the class. Her favorite part of gymnastics was wearing the leotard.
I will let you know how class goes.

I still can't blog about the in laws, I think I will acutally have to a one week special about the enitre clan since one blog entry just isn't enough space. They are characters (but not in a good way unless you consider blog fodder good).