[Karate] Purple Belts!

When my family started training at Fivestar Martial Arts, they allowed us to wear the orange belts that we'd just earned the week before at LaVallee's. So the first thing we needed to do was learn all the things that an orange belt was expected to know at Fivestar, but which wasn't part of the LaVallee's curriculum. This included the Fivestar version of 1-6 count kicking (which we only ever did once at LaVallee's). It included First Series, which is a set of blocks and strikes meant to be done with a partner - sort of a very simple form of bunkai. It also included Basic Combinations, a formalized series of punches and kicks. And we had to re-learn every self-defense technique, because they were all different at Fivestar. Once that was all done, we had to continue on to learn the new content that an orange belt was expected to master to progress. It's taken almost four months for our family to catch up to the standard of what we needed to know and then proceed on to the material for our next belt, but last night we finally made it!

We got an awesome workout, demonstrated what we'd learned, and at the end of the night we got to remove our orange belts, bow over them, and then tie on our brand-new, crisp purple belts. Yeah!