I have probably said it many times already on this blog, but I cannot keep myself from saying it again – I just love autumn in Japan. The colors, the skies, the way the wind feels on the skin, the sun shining at an angle, shining trough the leaves making them sparkle in all shades […]
Our son’s kindergarten is situated a little way up a mountainside. It is close to nature, a place to experience play, a place to run around as much as little legs can handle, and freedom to discover who you are. My son loves running around, and sine he started kindergarten I have also created new
Suddenly Sunday evening the fever appeared, and in the morning there was nothing else for me to do than to take our little guy to see the doctor. Fortunately the weather was perfect for a walk and my boy lay half asleep in his pram. We had not used it for several months and I
Typically October is a month with beautiful weather, blue skies and comfortable temperatures, in short weather perfect for hiking. Every year the community society where we live organize a hike up the nearest mountain in the end of October and just like last year we joined the group. Early morning we met at the local
Halloween is a very popular holiday in Japan. A big part of fall is set aside for Halloween and in every store and every nursery and kindergarten there is an abundance of pumpkins and ghosts and bats and other decorations. So also at our son’s kindergarten where we went to a little Halloween party at
The last week our little boy has been having a fever. The nights have been restless, filled with coughing that had him wake up all the time, almost as soon as he got back to sleep. It is of course a bit worrisome and painful to see our little boy in such discomfort, so the
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