Sunshine and Clouds

In the past week we have experienced a lot of rain which almost makes me think the rainy season has arrived when it is supposed to this year. Our first year we saw no change in precipitation during the late spring/early summer, and last year, when the rainy season finally did come, it was a month later than it should have been. 

After a week of almost solid rain, the sky cleared a tiny bit during the weekend so that we could have a barbecue for Rosie's birthday on Saturday, and get all of the laundry that had accumulated during the rainy week washed and dried. Thanks for cooperating so nicely clouds! 

Cake stacked and iced with cupcakes skewered to the top.

On Saturday, I woke up bright and early (seriously Rosie, you need to stop waking up before 5 am!) and got to work on decorating the birthday cake. I decided go with a hydrangea theme because they are one of my favorite flowers and this is the season that they are blooming in Japan. I had made 3 round cakes and a dozen cupcakes earlier in the week and frozen them and also 3 batches of icing the night before. I leveled off two of the three cakes and stacked the layers with icing in between in the brown plastic base of a planter pot. I did not level off the dome shaped top of the uppermost layer to give the cake a bit more roundness and height. I fully iced the cake in chocolate cream cheese icing so that it would look like a plant pot. I then arranged the cupcakes on the top of the cake and secured them in place by sticking 15 cm long skewers through them and into the cake. 

Finished!

To ice the cupcakes, I used the star tipped icing nozzle and an icing bag. I put blobs of purple and blue in the icing bag separately and tried not to mix it up too much so that I would get colour variation as I iced. I then took a few hydrangea leaves and arranged them here and there. As a side note, hydrangea leaves are mildly toxic (they contain cyanide), so I wrapped the cut ends in aluminum foil before decorating the cake with them. It was really easy and took me just over an hour to decorate from start to finish.

The only problem I ran into was that over the course of the morning, the temperature in our kitchen rose to 27˚ C and the humidity to 89%. The icing started to liquify and things started slipping so I had to pop it in the fridge until the party.

close up of the "flowers"

After icing the cake, I had to run off to work for the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon. While I was at work, Mr. Oshima took Theo on a tour of our local water treatment plant, something he has been talking about for months. We got to hear all about poop eating bacteria for the rest of the day. Yaaay! 

When I returned home we had a few close friends over for a barbecue to celebrate Rosie's birthday. 

Totally oblivious to the fact that it was her party

William and the Oshimas

First inspection of her birthday cupcake

Realizing that smashing it is so much more fun than eating it. 

Because the weather remained warm and mostly sunny the next day, I pulled out the little pool and let the kids splash around a bit.

This was Rosie's first time in the pool and she loved it.

Also, thanks to a little inspiration from my cousin over at lately léna, the boys and I spent a few hours on Sunday tie dyeing some old t-shirts and a onesie. 

Now I have a few cups of dye left over and my eyes are roving for anything else that could help me use it up. I've already convinced Dustin to let me have fun with some of his undershirts but who knows what else is going to get some colour around here!

Milestones

It may not be readily obvious all the time, but I do actually try to limit the number of posts I write that center exclusively on our kids. I recognize that children and their antics are always much more interesting to the parents and don't want to bore too many people. I know that unavoidably our blog will be pegged as a mommy blog, but for those who couldn't care less about how cute our kids are, I try to capture the goings on of our life on a broader scale. After that disclaimer, here is a whole post about what the kids have been up to lately:

For Theo's birthday, our crafty neighbours made a really cool Mario pinata. Theo had a great time bashing at it but eventually we gave up on the blind fold as his swings became more and more wild. William seemed just as enthusiastic as Theo did when candy started to spill from the hole he bashed in Mario's head (wow, I didn't realize how vicious this whole thing was!).  The next day, we were able to have more fun by turning the pinata into a helmet/mask. It's fantastic to have good neighbours!

William was pretty absorbed in checking out all of the fallen goodies

"It's-a me, Mario!"

Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper by Theo

Theo's new favorite past-time has been drawing in his sketch book. I absolutely love this new focus of his because every afternoon he happily doodles away for an hour or two instead of bounding around, destructing the apartment, and making his brother upset. I am always happy when my children develop skills that make them more independent and less demanding of my one on one attention. I think the reason he is so interested in drawing is that he has recently hit a big milestone in fine motor skills and hand eye coordination. All of a sudden he has been able to draw fairly accurate shapes, pictures that are more or less distinguishable for what he says they are (even though the cats have eight legs and resemble spiders with tails), most letters, and even a few hiragana. He seems to have entered into a very sensitive period for learning to write letters and numbers, so I am more than happy to indulge his interest. He has also taken to labeling things in the house, like his brother.

I'm not quite sure what his label is supposed to mean, but William didn't seem to mind it one bit.

Also, despite the chilly temperatures and wind, we have been able to get out on the weekends and discover a few of the nice parks in our area and fly our kite. Once the weather warms up a bit more, I would like to get Theo a little pole so he can learn to fish. Most of the parks in our area are along the river, so it would be easy to teach him at one of these.

Flying the kite from the wind free comfort of the play tube

Making sure that the park pandas get enough bamboo

Meanwhile, William has grown a few more teeth and is able to cruise his way along all of our furniture to dismantle and bite anything he can get his grubby little hands on. He has a remarkably driven curiosity and Theo is always a willing accomplice in his most destructively mischievous acts. Here are a few recent shots of wee Wills:

Pretending to be mild mannered and innocent

Now showing his true personality and his four new sharp teeth

His favorite scrunch faced grin

Samurai in training

...and that is what has been going on in our children's lives in the past couple of weeks.  

Castle Shiodoru

Cutting and taping the cardboard

Dustin has had it in his mind to build Theo a castle for a few weeks. Theo has an awesome dragon toy and a few knights, so we thought he would enjoy having a place for them to have daring adventures and heroic dragon battles.

After purchasing a new chair and futon pad for our apartment last week, we found ourselves with a small pile of unneeded cardboard and so decided to finally make a castle. If it was me making it, I would have cut battlements on the top of the cardboard, a hole for the door, and called it a day. Lucky for Theo, Dustin is much more hardcore when it comes to creating toys. Theo had expressed his desire for a Japanese style castle, so they set to work.

After a few hours of cutting, taping, paining, and drawing rocks the castle was complete. Between William and Theo, it will probably only take a few weeks before it is a flattened, torn mass of scrap cardboard. I am sure that many samurai battles will be staged there before its inevitable destruction.

Yōchien II

Only a few days after I had decided to quit inquiring about preschools for Theo and wait for April, we met a woman who lives in Fukuyama and speaks fluent English. She asked us if we were planning on sending Theo to yōchien and I told her about all of the problems I ran into just trying to find out any information. She informed me that her 2 nephews and niece attend a great private yōchien that is in our neighbourhood, and they happened to be having their open house that coming Saturday. She also let me know that almost all yōchien have some kind of information day mid-October where you can pick up applications and all applications for the following April are due November 1st. She volunteered to go with me and translate.

At the open house, the principal covered the school's teaching philosophy and curriculum. The day runs from 9:30 am to 2: 30 pm, with exercising and sports for the first half of the day, and teaching for the last half of the day. She spoke for a while about how their goal is to help the children develop the right hemisphere of the brain and the importance of right brained activities. They teach them kanji, calligraphy, music, and dance. After listening to the principal's speech, we did a tour of all the little classrooms and the outdoor areas. There was a big open area for organized sports, a few play structures and play houses, and a garden where the children were growing vegetables. The classrooms where all friendly, bright and clean. 

My friend introduced me to the principal, who speaks a bit of English and she told me that if Theo were to attend there, they had space for him to start as early as November 1st. My friend offered to take me to other schools to check them out, but I just got the feeling that Theo would fit in well at this school. It is also very close to our apartment and my friend and her sister (who's children attend there) are, and will be invaluable resources for sorting out the language barrier. I was also able to speak with the principal about Theo's medical conditions and she seemed more than willing to work with us to keep him safe while not making him stand out too much. Well, not any more than being the only foreigner in the kindergarten makes him already stand out. We set up an appointment with the principal for an interview, uniform fitting, and filling out paperwork.

At this appointment I was given the run down of required classroom materials. Every student must have the exact same school and art supplies, and seemingly a million bags to bring all of their school things in. Each bag must have exact dimensions, and every last eraser, marker cap and pouch must be labeled with their name. Needless to say, after writing Theo's name in katakana about 300 times, I have gotten really good at it. It would have been nearly impossible to find all of the required bags in the exact dimensions specified, so I went to the fabric store and picked up a bit of really cute cloth and got busy sewing.   

His necessary bags are (top to bottom, left to right) Bento lunch box bag, water bottle bag, cup and toothbrush bag, extra pair of undies bag, folder and artwork carrier bag, shoes bag, and towel and extra change of clothes bag. 

Here is a glimpse at all of the crazy art supplies that we needed to purchase from the school. Because every child has the exact same set (can't let anyone be an individual, can we?) every last lid, cover, pastel, and cap had to be labeled to prevent it from getting lost. I don't think I have ever owned such expensive art supplies, especially not when I was 3!

We also had to purchase this awesome and slightly ridiculous instrument for Theo. It is apparently called a melodica. It is played by connecting the white tube to the end of the keyboard and blowing into the mouth piece while playing the keys. Considering it cost us about $85 Canadian, I really hope that he enjoys it.   

There are also really cute uniforms that Theo must wear, but I will be putting up photos of him in them later. 

It would have been nearly impossible for me to find my way through the application process, to understand what Theo is required to bring on a daily basis, and how the schedule and system works without the help of an interpreter who was willing to sift through a mountain of papers and answer my every last question. I wish that I had some advice to give for someone looking for a yōchien for their child, but it seems like we just had a stroke of good fortune and circumstance in finding connections.

  

Knitting Needles of Doom

Years ago, my brother and I realized that we had very different views about gardening. I love plants and watching them grow, but the edibility of the plant has very little bearing on whether I like it or not. In my opinion, beautiful flowers, interesting leaves, and fruit are all an equally good reason to grow a certain plant. However, my brother couldn't be bothered if the plant doesn't produce something he can't eat or use. If it doesn't put out for him, he won't put out for it.

I have been a bit reminded of this discrepancy since my mom has been up north visiting us. She has been more or less knitting constantly since arriving. She has started, stopped, finished, and changed countless projects sometimes all in the course of a day. Usually the projects are leaning into the bizarre realm, like the Wizard of Oz themed blanket(?) that she is making at the moment.

Possibly I don't get the joy of creative knitting; to me it should be strictly functional. You make a sweater, pair of slippers, or hat. You do not knit the whole royal wedding. Maybe one day, 35 years from now, I will pick up knitting and realize that I only have the desire to knit little fluffy Cthulhu dolls, wooly parasites, or internal organs, but for now I wonder what it will take to get my mom to make me a simple cable knit sweater.

On the other hand, Theo has been loving the weird knitting. He has been enjoying his dozen doughnuts, little flying pig, and rat. I must admit that I do like my TARDIS Kindle cover and Dustin has been pushing for a little felted Yoda hat for William. However, I think I might start hiding her knitting needles if she starts knitting things like this: