Sanctioned Spousal Abuse

No one's updated their blogs in the last few days, probably because of the busy holiday bustle, but still...dang slackers.  Don't they realize that I'm on break now and in dire need of some good reading material?  =)

Today Sarah came over and we scrapped some pages together.  I'm not much into scrapbooking anymore, but once a year I create pages for my mother-in-law's "Family Theme Night" album, and I give them to her as one of her Christmas gifts.  The book is quite impressive, and huge, since I've scrapped every Family Theme Night since 2003.  This year I actually had to buy my mother-in-law a new book, because the other one finally became too full.  Sarah and I started at around noon today, and by 5:30 I had only four pages scrapped.  It takes a really long time to do each page--especially when it's a gift for someone else, because I try to make everything perfect.  I wish I could lighten up with the whole thing, but I'm just anal like that (I hate the word "anal," but I'm lacking a better word at the moment).

After scrapping, we took the kids to McDonalds for dinner.  Then Clint and I went to K-Mart to pick up a few things.  On our way home, we drove passed the house shown below.  The picture doesn't do it justice; in person, it is stunning.  The little silohuettes in front of the house are our kids, so enraptured by all of the lights that they begged us to let them out of the car so they could get a closer look.

Unrelated, but I mentioned in an earlier blog that I was going to be Clint's partner in kickboxing for the first time.  I just wanted to give a quick update about how that went, and I can sum it up in one sentence:  He kicked my a#@!  We were working on defense maneuvers and counter punches, and every time I was supposed to dodge, I didn't dodge fast enough and I would get clobbered.  Not by Clint's punches (I blocked those), but by his feet.  We were supposed to purposefully try to stomp on our partners' feet to motivate them to dodge.  My left foot was so smashed by the end of the class that I wasn't even sure if I could wear my shoe.  I don't bruise, which sucks for me, because I still feel bruises, but I just have nothing to show for the pain.  And let me tell you, I have the biggest, nastiest, and most invisiblest bruise on the top of my foot right now.  Damn I wish you could see it (and me too); you'd be like, "Wow, that's a nasty bruise," and I'd be all like, "Oh this?  This is nothing," while inwardly sucking in the attention and feeling proud of my battle wound.  But this scenario will never happen, because I have nothing to show for my agony other than a slight smudge.  (On a side note, I hate it when my students say "I was like..." and "she was like...," but for some reason the shallowness of those words seems to work in the above imaginary conversation).

Despite my smashed but perfecty healthy-looking foot, I had an amazing time in class with Clint as my partner.  He and I fought each other so energetically, and I've never had a partner so aptly keep me on my toes before (or smash them, for that matter).  The other students were so entertained by our sparring; after awhile I became conscience of the fact that several students in the class were watching us intead of practicing the moves themselves.  Some were even shouting out at us (stuff like "Get em' Jodi!" or "You gonna take that from your wife?!"), and the verbal baiting was just energizing us even more.  At one point I punched Clint, hard, expecting him to block as usual.  I was shocked when my jab landed square on his forehead...it had caught him off-guard.  I immediately dropped my gloves and cried out, "Oh my God, honey!  Are you okay?!"  That gave everyone in the class a good laugh.  I guess despite it all, I'm still just a girl.

Overall, working with Clint is such a far cry from the "polite" sparring that I normally do with the other white and orange belt females in the class that I don't think I'll ever be able to go back.  After class, I determined that this "sanctioned spousal abuse" (as Clint jokingly dubbed it) is very therepeutic and I'm already itching for some more.  I think this might be slightly psychotic, but I'm okay with that.