Being a parent of a baby going to hoikuen, kindergarten, is a very labeling experience, literally. Every room at the hokiuen has a name, and in the entrance to our baby’s classroom they have provided a little basket with our son’s name, and in this basket we are to make sure that there are diapers with his name, undershirts with his name, T-shirts with his name, pants with his name, small towels with his name. And not to forget a bib with his name.

When I think of a bib for eating, I think of a plastic scarf (soft or hard), with a pocket for dropped food, that is put around the baby’s neck and has some kind of attachment mechanism on the back of the neck. Our son dislikes these kinds of bibs (as well as the soft small cotton bibs that he was using when very little and was drooling a lot) and since he is quite strong and good with his fingers we have stopped using bibs all together – they come off the minute we put them on. The hoikuen bib though, is a completely different “contraption”.

The teacher, sensei, gave us instructions of what to bring the first time we came, and among other things she showed us the hokiuen style bib that we were supposed to make, label and bring for our baby. The hokiuen bib is a long narrow towel that is folded in two, and where the fold is an elastic band is to be for lack of a better word hemmed. After having bought the necessary ingredients and tools, I spent an evening neatly sewing in the elastic band.

Fast forward a month or two – in between his many colds, our son has been to hoikuen (very reluctantly, crying when leaving him) a dozen times and each time my beautifully created bib has seemed almost unused when I pick him up. If this has been connected to the fact that he does not like to wear it and therefore does not want to eat, or if he does not want to eat and therefore there is no food to spill or to wipe from his face I do not know, although I guess that him having been sick all the time also plays a big part in his poor appetite. We were actually a bit concerned about his waning interest in food, so now that he is finally back to his normal healthy self, fond of food like never before, we have decided to let him have sommarlov – a summer break from hokiuen and from bib-using. And hopefully a break from all those inevitable baby colds as well.