What do you want to do today, we asked our son last Sunday. It is summer holiday and we thought we were going to do something special, a little family excursion to our son’s liking. He did not hesitate – I want to go to Fukuoka tower, he said. Fukuoka Tower is located by the […]
Giving gifts to say thank you is a seasonal thing in Japan, new year season and summer being the two periods where most of the gift-giving occur. Companies can send customers gifts, patients can send a gift to for example a doctor or dentist who has been particularly helpful to them, friends and relatives can
After rain. Comes more rain – that is how I have experienced summer so far this year. Sure, there have been a few days or hours of sun in between the persistent showers, but the last month has really given us a lot of precipitation. And nature has loved it – the grass is growing visibly day
It is adorable to see how love and nursing instincts express themselves in the behavior of a little toddler. While we have ample opportunities to experience everyday love, the additional feelings that come out when mom or dad is feeling under the weather are so cute in the way they show up. Not long ago
After months of waking up and still half asleep making a perfectly beautiful omelette for my son, I felt like quite the omelette master. Break an egg, add some milk and spices and stir while the frying pan with some rapeseed oil is getting warm, pour the mix into the pan, lower the temperature, wait
We live in a part of the world where seismic activity and volcanos are part of life. We live in a house where dinosaur-books and water-play is a common feature in everyday activities. We are a family where we use three languages in our conversations. Unsurprisingly, this all gets mixed, and sometimes in the cutest
Like the previous two years, come end of May, our son got a really bad cold. But unlike the time when he turned two and three, this year on his fourth birthday he had recovered enough to both go back to his kindergarten and to have a birthday party with grandma. He has been talking
Before going to sleep, I set my alarm at 7.15 to make sure we will have enough time for all the morning preparations needed for a little boy to go to kindergarten. In fairness I would not really have to set the alarm since I almost every morning wake up before it goes off, wake
Our son loves his eggs. Boiled, scrambled, fried, omelette, or poached in miso soup – they are all delicious to him. He often start the day with rice, some fish or meat and vegetables, together with some kind of eggdish. At first he only wanted to eat the yolk if it was mixed with the white
Having an energetic toddler at home I have come to learn, means always being busy (to put it mildly). We have a lot of fun together, playing games, doing puzzles, reading books, doing things around the house like cooking, hanging the laundry, watering the little vegetable garden. We are going grocery shopping, doing small excursions
During the school spring break we had dear visitors from Tokyo who used their little holiday to come and spend some days in Fukuoka with us. It was such a happy occasion and our son was thrilled to spend time playing with his older friends. The difficult thing with being the youngest though, is not
Quite often mum is working late so it is only son and dad that do the before-bed-story time-routine together. We normally start with a Swedish picture book, or (as we have done recently) read a chapter from Pippi Långstrump, Pippi Longstocking, the famous and still very popular children’s books character created by Astrid Lindgren. (As