Most of our day was spent watching Emmett’s martial arts tournament, inside a cramped, hot gym. While it didn’t take as long as last year, it still felt like we were there forever.

Emmett was in group 9 and group 11. This meant he had a long wait before it was his turn.

The level of competition was higher this year, and that caught Emmett off guard. He did awesomely but didn’t rank in a way that made him happy.

He placed 2nd and 3rd in his respective categories. We couldn’t be any prouder of him, but placing 3rd hit him quite hard. Part of the problem with that was the announcer misspoke and initially called Emmett as 2nd place before correcting himself and calling Emmett for 3rd instead.

That was quite rough.

This shook him, and it threw him for a bit of a loop. He needed a minute to collect himself before he performed in his last competition of the day. Luckily, it was about an hour between his matches.

He refocused and did awesome with his weapons demonstration. He took 2nd place and was happy with himself.

After the tournament, we took the kids to lunch because we wanted to cheer Emmett up and celebrate what we thought was an awesome day.

Emmett was frustrated with the entirely random way they seemed to score the participants. He’s not wrong because we couldn’t figure it out either. Some kids struggled and ended up scoring higher or on par with other kids who were just crazy good. We noticed this on several occasions, and while I’m sure there’s a rhyme and reason, we didn’t follow.

Emmett is very, very logical and he struggles when things don’t make sense to him.

We tried to help him, but he needed to work through this on his own.

It wasn’t until bedtime that Emmett was able to reframe his experience enough to feel better about it. He was so hard on himself because last year, he took 1st place in everything and I think he was anticipating a repeat this year.

He’s feeling better about it now and went to bed happy. It was a rough evening until he worked through this, but we all work through things in our own time.

This was a valuable experience for him. Emmett is so used to being the best at everything else does; he will benefit long term from being reminded that there’s always someone better.

Maybe that didn’t come out right.

Emmett’s a very humble person. He never brags about his accomplishments, but he always ends up on top. Knowing what it feels like to not finish on top is important.

We’re proud of him, and we hope he will feel proud of himself as well.