Early Sunday morning we gathered with our neighbors on the little road outside. Our house is one of eight sharing a narrow winding road that gets us from the big street to the bottom of the mountain where our group of houses is situated. Every autumn the neighbors gather and clean the road and this […]
Sometimes our son seems to grow more in one day than in a whole month. My wife and I were talking the other day about when we should stop call him baby; of course he is still our little baby (and I guess he will continue to be as long as we live), but we
Since becoming a father I have not had the time to work so much on my own art and poetry. Well that was a bit of an understatement – I have been too busy nursing our son, taking care of the house, moving from Tokyo, trying to find some daily time to study Japanese, that
One of the things I really love about Japan is the politeness, best illustrated by the custom of bowing. When I am outside playing with our son, and one of our neighbors comes driving home, they always slow down and make a bow in the car. When someone makes an errand to the house, they
With eight teeth in his mouth it had become time for our son’s first visit to the dentist. We had a very good image of our chosen dental clinic – it is a children’s only clinic and we had to wait almost two months for our appointment since it is very popular with so many good
Sometimes I am woken up at six am by a little finger poking my face and a voice energetically saying bumbum bumbum, and before I have time to properly realize it is already morning, my son is pulling my arm, urging me to go and open the cupboard where the vacuum cleaner is charging. He
I’ve been dreaming about this day for over a year, wondering how I would feel; would the stress diminish, would my outlook on the future change, would my hope of soon being able to go to Sweden with my family grow? I’ve been dreaming about this day, about writing this blog post, and now when
From our house, the first thing we see in the morning when we open the curtains, and the last ting we see at night while the sun is setting behind the big pine trees growing on a hill next to our house, is Imayama. Imayama, 今山 is a small small mountain close to the sea
Having a baby is being a student of human emotions. Every day I live in my son’s sea of feelings ranging from anger to absolute joy and excitement. It never ceases to amaze me how he can angrily bite on my finger one second, and hug me like a koala bear the next, not letting
Obon is a Japanese Buddhist custom that is celebrated each summer, where the particulars differs between different parts of Japan. My wife explains it as a three day celebration of the spirits of ancestors who during these days come back to visit graves and house altars, and the living relatives offer food and sake and
In front of our house, we have a little vegetable garden. Or maybe that is a bit too much to say – we are planning to have a vegetable garden; so far we only have one kind of vegetables, two okra plants that my mother-in-law planted for us the first week after we moved in
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