Taking a Squire

So this is going to be a mostly SCA post. At Kingdom 12th night I took my first squire. This is something that I can do since my knighting in August. The squire/knight relationship is going to be interesting, its somewhere between teacher, mentor and advocate. It's tough to explain if you aren't familiar with how the SCA works, and if you are then I'm sure you'll have you're own idea of what being a squire means. I didn't have a lot of time with my knight, though I did have a number of surrogates, as a result I'm kind of modeling what I want the relationship to be off a number of influences. However, I realized that at the end of the day my expectations may be too high when taking my new squire's oath of fealty one of the things I responded with was "I won't ask anything of you I wouldn't do myself" which also means I may end up expecting my level of commitment and dedication from someone else, and I'm not sure if that's fair but I think that is what's going to happen.
For regalia I've decided to go with the traditional red belt, a silver squire's chain (more common in AEthelmearc than it was in Atlantia, but something I'm comfortable with), a spear (something ha my knight did with his squires that I really liked), my wife is making a fighting tunic and wanted to continue the tradition of giving the new squire's lady amber (something my knight did that she really liked) and finally I let him be gifted with sliver spurs (something that I hadn't considered, but am okay with). All things that are now kind of set as what I'll do for future squires. And now I know how to make a spear and a chain necklace. It was funny, while I was making the chain for my squire my son became interested in the links and wanted his own chain, so I made a shorter one for him, he wore it for about half the time we were at 12th night.
So SCA goal for this year is the same as the last two years, win the next crown tournament. There's 15 weeks until crown tournament. That should give me 3 weeks to finish general conditioning, then 6 weeks of strength work and fighting basics and finally 6 weeks of speed and conditioning work with as much fighting as I can get. I think I'll be buying a heavier kettlebell next week, it'll also help with my son's increasing weight and continuing insistence that he still needs to be carried and then falls asleep.
And now for those of you who need more pictures of my son: