I don't care what anyone says about Mondays, Mondays are always good to us here at Hulk's. Perhaps it's people feeling guilty about lounging away (or drinking away) their weekend or people viewing Monday, the first day of the new work week, as a new chance to start fresh because Monday's are always greeted with new members and a high attendance of regular ones. We had so many Hulkies training today that I ran out of room on today's attendance page in our book -- I had to write names in the margin.
Our busiest hour was 7pm -- it's one of two 'golden hours'. At 7pm we had four visitors and 12 Hulkies walk in to train, that's in addition to the 7 Hulkies continuing their training from 6pm and the one person I was having a meeting with -- 24 people, 26 if you include Snickers and I.
In addition to the massive flock of Hulkies coming to train, I got an extra special new member -- a new mini-Hulkie. He's our smallest, youngest, and quite possibly are most smiley member. We now have seven mini-Hulkies, and by "mini" I mean they're members who are all super cute, ooze with giggles, bounce around like little monkeys, and who are all under the age of 12. Nothing is mini about the amount of energy they bring to training, that's for sure! I think Snickers has made me responsible for them because I tend to have a lot more energy than him and quite frankly it's easier for me to do padwork with them because I'm short. So I take care of training them but during my training with them, Snickers always becomes somewhat envious of all the high fives and hugs I get.
I may not be a fan of babies but kids I like. Don't get me wrong though, after about an hour of training them, it's quite nice to see them leave. They eat a lot of my energy, especially considering some of them continually insist on climbing all over me like I'm some kind of walking, talking jungle gym. Our mini-Hulkies come in waves throughout the day and thank goodness too. It gives me just enough time to recharge my batteries which, in some cases, means me having to down a shot of cheap juice bar-made espresso. The kids are great -- our mini-Hulkies are great -- but they're completely exhausting and, ironically enough, they're among the most dedicated of our members. My mini-Hulkies train five days a week, every day we're open, and sometimes they stop by after school just to say hi and then come back later to train.
The two young sisters who I've been training with for three months now always bring me a gift every week, sometimes it's a gift a day. These gifts are things that they secretly put in my pockets or pass to me so that no one else sees them giving me it. Usually it's some kind of piece of gum or a random small trinket. I've started giving them gifts too, like stickers. Snickers was totally unaware that this gift-exchanging had been going on until he saw something tonight that made him take a double-take -- a high five exchanged between me and the oldest sister that ended with me putting something in my pocket. She had given me an plastic ring. Snickers caught the whole scene and continually asked over and over what had just happened. So I told him what had happened, she had given me a little gift, and he looked so left out.
"How come you don't like kids but they totally love you and give you things?" he asked. "They won't even take a picture with me", he added. And so here I repeat, it's not that I don't like kids, I do like kids, it's babies who I'm not a fan of. "Listen", I told him, "I think they give me things to kind of make up for all the random injuries they cause me during training." We both laughed, it sounded funny, but it is true. I do get injured training the mini-Hulkies. I'm talking about them constantly mistaking my boxing punches and then randomly hitting me. And when they stand there at four-feet-nothing and I'm five feet tall, their mistake punches usually smack me in the chest. Then there is the random medicine ball that seems to get thrown at me, the ball-on-the-cord that continually gets kicked in my direction, and let's not forget them insisting I skip with them in their skipping rope. A skipping rope hurts when it hits bare skin! For all those mini-Hulkie induced injuries, I am reimbursed with sticks of gum, hugs, tickles, and the random little trinket.
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