Yes, Sensei! (Or, Sweep the Knee, Jonny!)

We owe much to our dear friends the Irvines.  They are a couple we met long ago at church but it's only been in the past year or so that we've really gotten to know them and thus fallen madly in love with their friendship.  Cullen, a computer genius, has been to our home on any number of occasions to fix both minor and major troubles with our various machines. These have been rather embarassing but yet strangely bonding.  Any time you allow someone to not only look at but thouroughly delve into the space behind your computer your frienship will never be the same.  Myca, the feminie half of this amazing duo, has found it in her heart to not only sit by me at church to help keep the kids busy and quiet while Troy sits on the stand, but to offer several evenings of babysitting to us.  She is the first (and as far as I know, only) person who has ever put Bundle to bed  besides me or her father, and even he has only done it rarely and with much weeping on the part of Bundle.  Okay, it's gotten better but Troy's been through some rough times with that girl. The Irvines seem to genuninely love our kids and I find it a great pleasure to attempt to repay their kindness by having them over for dinner from time to time, which is not nearly as often as they deserve.  Of course, every time they come over they do stuff like bring activities for the kids and play with them even more, so we continually sink deeper into debt to them.  But of all the people on the planet, there's few people better to be in debt to.

Over the weekend I tested out my latest pizza-on-the-grill recipe on them.  (Almost perfect - just needed a bit more salt and better sauce.  But the caramelized onions and fresh ricotta cheese made up for those deficienices.)  After we had stuffed ourselves with pizza we sat in the livingroom chatting.  The topic of conversation turned to Cullen's history and the fact that he had earned his black belt in Tae Kwon Do.  Seriously.  That is awesome.  My son turned to him in amazement, his eyes lighting up, and took off to the other room to dig his hand-me-down karate uniform from out of the dregs of the dress-up box.  Cullen showed him exactly how to tie the belt and then took the kid in the back yard to give him a real live karate-type lesson.  Bitty joined in the fun (after donning all the white clothing she could find) and pretty soon both kids were out in the yard yelling, "Hah! Hah!" and learning some serious moves.  The joy on their faces was like unto  Christmas morning, and I'm trying to figure out just how much dinner it's going to take to get Cullen over here on a weekly basis to further the education of my children. 

He reads this blog.  Perhaps he can figure the dinner-to-karate ratio and get back to me.