A short anecdote from our little family. One busy morning this week as we were getting dressed preparing to go and wait for the kindergarten bus, my son took an interest in the top of my head. I was bending down, arranging his socks, when he suddenly said pappa, du har en ladugårdsplan på huvudet. […]
My son and I have been playing with letters for more than a year now and he has gotten quite good at recognizing and pronouncing them. He has come to the point where he is enjoying trying to read shorter words and while in Sweden I bought a couple of learn-to-read-books that we have started
My son farmor, grandmother, worked many many years as a Swedish language teacher for children with Swedish as a second language. What better way for a little Japanese speaking child to improve his Swedish than playing and reading and going shopping and cooking with my mom! During our time in Sweden, my son has been
A big patch of rain passed by and left behind 15 degrees lower temperatures. Suddenly, I found myself turning off the air conditioner, finding the long sleeved pajamas from my son, and having cold feet in the literal sense for the first time in many many months. Of course, with a rapid change in weather
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
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
We came home from Sweden, my son started kindergarten, and soon thereafter he got his first cold of this year. Though it was to be expected, I had even anticipated it, it would have been nice to have a few more days to get life in order before turning our house into a sick bay.
How our son has grown during our time in Sweden, and not just in size – I think we all felt it, his parents as well as his grandparents. He has become even more independent and also fully embraced a life where the spoken language is Swedish. Thinking about the years my son and I
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
Our son has only met his Swedish grandparents once, last summer when we went to Sweden. We stayed for a few weeks and he got to know them and play with them, and I believe he really came to love them. Fast forward nine months, a long time in the life of a quickly growing
I am already behind my son in language skills. Almost every week he uses some Japanese word I do not know and I am sure he sooner rather than later will start to read faster than me too. In one area we are on the same level though, and that is when it comes to