Disable a button and updateData of a model

I'm trying to disable a button and it works great in javascript but once I update a model it switches the button back to enable. I'm assuming it's drawing the page again on model update. Is there any way to disable the button?  Here is my test javascript code.

skuid.$('#TestButton').button('disable');
 var mydateModel = skuid.model.getModel('AEMDate');
 var firstDateRow = mydateModel.getFirstRow();
 alert('end date = ' + firstDateRow.End_Date__c);
 mydateModel.updateData();