I give my wife plenty of opportunities to laugh at my Japanese skills (or I should say lack thereof). I can reasonably well talk about the weather with our neighbors, speak about every day matters with my wife, sufficiently communicate with school teachers, other parents and children’s health professionals. I have also come up with …
It feels like yesterday when my son and I were walking past the rice fields on our way home from kindergarten while looking at the little tadpoles swimming around the all but non-existent rice plants. It was late spring and there was a long hot summer lying before us, nature outings, trips to the beach, …
I often feel like one of those lawn moving robots that have become so popular in Sweden. Nowadays you can see them in every other backyard, spending their days crawling around on the lawn, cutting the grass. What I do is spending all my waking hours crawling around inside a Japanese home instead, cleaning up …
I guess we are in the middle of a big transition phase in our family and especially so in my son’s life – from home life to Kindergarten life, from being a baby to becoming a toddler, from needing his parents’ help to being able to dress and eat by himself, from being at the …
It is the middle of summer and the vegetables in our little garden are thriving like plants in a jungle. My mother-in-law is the one who takes care of it, grows the vegetables, gives the nutrients, does the weeding and harvesting – all I have to do is giving the garden water those days when the …
It is getting hot now. Often too hot to be outside without feeling like I have stepped into a sauna. Not a dry one, but one with high humidity that makes me want to change my clothes as soon as I step into it. The Japanese summer has arrived and I am both looking forward …
About once a month, there is an open day at the kindergarten aimed at children who are not yet in daycare. The kindergarten bus, the one and only Thomas the Tank Engine school bus, picks up toddlers and parents at the nearby shopping center and takes them up the mountainside to the kindergarten for an …
It has been a joyful couple of weeks for our son at his new kindergarten. He has gotten used to the place, has started to get new friends and has come to love his teachers. His parents have also been so lucky as to be able to share a few mornings at the kindergarten with …
As if our world was not changing fast enough with a three year old toddler keeping the pace, my wife and I decided to throw in a little bit more change. We had thought our choice of Kindergarten for our son was a good one, we had made several visits, tried it a few days …
Our son is growing fast, although he lost some weight the last months thanks to all the illness he had to go through. But I am sure he will get it back soon since he has found his appetite again. At the three year checkup the other day, we saw that he is well above …
It is five years since that Sunday when my wife and I, hand in hand, went down the dark stairs to enter the basement of the Setagaya Ward Office and get married. I remember us standing at the top of the stairs, looking down, seeing the pipes on the wall going down into the basement, …
Our son had been excited for weeks about his upcoming birthday. He was practicing holding three fingers up in the air, and he was looking forward to the presents he anticipated he would get. We were planning to have a little birthday party for him, and even the weather seemed promising, so what could go …