Great Expectations

Lately, I've started to get frustrated with all the little things in my life and my children's lives that I am working toward but to which I never seem to be getting any closer. I decided to make a list of things I wanted accomplished by the time we wrap up 2014. I figured a little over 3 months is a perfect amount of time to clear up some of these little things and get some larger things in motion.

Personally, there are a ton of things I would like get better about by the new year but at the top of the list is blogging more often, setting a consistent and committed schedule for studying Japanese, being more consistent and dedicated about my exercise regimen, and to begin teaching myself to play the ukulele. Basically all of this revolves around finding more time in my life and not about lack of motivation or desire. I am still working on finding a solution to balancing all of the things I wish to do in the tiny scraps of time that are left over between caring for the children, the house, and working. I don't really do extremely structured routines and time slots, but it almost seems that I will have to start adopting some kind of strict daily planning to fit what I want to in my life.

Though my personal expectations are usually on hyper drive, I am definitely no Tiger Mother. I think my expectations of the kids are fairly realistic but sometimes I am overwhelmed by the sheer amount of life skills that I need to teach them before the can possibly be confident and capable human beings. For the time being, William and Rosie are the lucky ones since I don't really have any grand expectations of them at all. At least not anything that I have felt like I am slacking off as a parent about. William is speaking a lot more now, in both English and Japanese, not that I really had any control over that anyway, and Rosie is finally starting to sleep consistently through the night with very minimal effort on my part to put her to sleep. Both of them eat fairly well and healthily and William has been potty trained for over a year and Rosie is too young to start. Nothing to do for the time being but to watch them grow.

Meanwhile, Theo's English reading ability is still pretty shaky. We usually try to fit in 15 minutes of English reading/writing practice into the evening on weekdays but some days he just has so much Japanese and math homework (sometimes over an hour of work in first grade!) that his attention span is just shot by the end without tacking on any extra. Also, Dustin has decided he doesn't have the patience to teach him and signed off on the whole endeavor which means that nothing happens on evenings that I am working. I really wish that someone could just take this cup from me, but seeing as Theo gets no English in school that is not an option. In the past few weeks he has been improving significantly so I am pretty hopeful that in the next three months he will be off and running and reading independently. I really can't wait until he discovers how magical and wonderful the world of books really is!

Theo's homework stack

Another thing on Theo's list was teaching him to ride his bike without training wheels. Theo and I put in a lot of bike riding time over the last half of summer break, going on one hour bike rides each day, but I never got around to actually taking the training wheels off until two days ago. It doesn't help that Theo is the size of an average 9 year old here, so on our bike rides we would often get some person giving him a strange look and one old man even told me to take his training wheels off already. Sigh. On Monday we heading to our neighbourhood park sans training wheels and on his first try he kept his balance and cruised around the park with no problems at all. He was absolutely brimming with pride and self accomplishment and kept singing Queen's "Bicycle" at the top of his lungs.


I'll let you know how many of my personal goals I actually crossed off my list by the new year!

Japanese House Tour Part 2

A couple of people have asked me when I was going to finish off the tour of the house we moved into a few months ago. Without further ado, here is the other side of our house and the second floor. 

If you remember from my last house post, when you enter the house there is a door to the left, a door to the right, and a flight of stairs. If you were to go up the stairs (be careful, they are super narrow and steep!) you would find a landing with a closet at the top:

There are also two bedrooms. One of them is a very tiny three tatami mat sized one with a closet. This is Theo's room for now, but Dustin has all sorts of grandiose plans of building bunk beds for the boys in here.

The second room is six tatami mats and this is where William, Dustin, and I sleep.

Here is another angle of the room showing the closet that takes up most of the side wall.

There are double fusuma doors that lead from our room into Theo's bedroom.

For anyone who does not live in Japan, we all sleep on futons. In our case, that includes a bottom memory foam layer, a thin mattress, comforter, and pillows. They are super comfortable and we have never had to worry about Theo rolling out of bed. You actually fold them up every morning and place them into the very large deep closets in the bedrooms. Here is Theo modeling the size of where I stuff our futon.

Now back downstairs...when entering the house, if you were to take the door to the right of the stairs, you would find yourself in the kitchen, dining room, computer room. As this is the business end of the house, the toilet and sink room is also located here.

The back curtain hides the sink and mirror, and the door in the back is where the toilet is located:

Here is what lies beyond the green curtain. It was a bit weird to me at first that the shower, sink, and toilet are all in different parts of the house. Now that I have gotten used to it though, I think it is very practical to have them all separate.

Here is the small toilet room, which contains two windows, a wall cabinet, and typical Japanese sink/toilet with heated seats and all sorts of built in bidet options.

When the toilet flushes, the tap on the sink runs too, so you can wash your hands.

Here is a close up of the control panel that gives you all of you squirting and spraying options.

and with the side panel open. I think this controls how warm the heated seat becomes, but since we have only been in this house since the summer, we haven't tried it out. Truthfully, we leave it unplugged all the time because I can't even imagine the mess I would have to clean up if Theo decided to play around with those buttons.

Here is a view of our computer corner. Dustin built the desk not too long ago and it is a major improvement over the teeny one we bought when we first came. The wooden door leads to the entry way and the window looks into the front yard.

Here is a long view of that room showing the dining area

and the other direction showing the kitchen area.

Behind the fridge is a back door that is in a little dropped down alcove. The back door leads out to our little veggie garden and compost bin.

This is our little kitchen. It is miniscule compared to kitchen's back in Canada, but compared to our apartment it is great. I still can't get over how much space we have comparatively.

Lastly, here is another shot of our yard since the grass we planted filled in. It is so nice to have something other than rocks and sand for the  children to run and play on!

So there is the intimate tour of the innards of our house. It is weird to think that we have only been living in it for 3 months now. I am sure a lot is going to change over the years.

Japanese House Tour Part 1

It is always amazing to me how little time it takes to accumulate things. I have moved a lot in my life and each time I manage to pare my things down to only a few suitcases. Inevitably time passes and those few suitcases multiply.

So, it has happened again. Somehow, without being really aware of it, the few suitcases of personal items we brought to Japan increased until we are now able to comfortably fill and furnish a small house. Our furnishings are still pretty spartan compared with most of the Japanese houses and apartments we have been to though. Dustin and I have noticed people's tendency to have towering mountains of furniture and assorted stuff that stretches to the ceiling and covers almost every available bit of flooring. I am pretty sure that I would lose my mind if I had to spend every waking moment keeping the boys from bounding into, climbing, and toppling endless stacks of stuff. Maybe this is why children here are kept out of the house in day cares, kindergartens, and endless extra curricular classes from such an early age.

Without further ado, here is a tour of one half of our new place:

When you enter through the front door, you find yourself in a large, old style genkan. There is a 36 cm step from this concrete entrance area onto a wooden landing that takes you into the rest of the house.

ただいま!

From the landing, there is a door to the left, a door to the right, and a flight of stairs leading to the second floor. Today, we will enter through the door on the left. 

Beyond the door is a small sunroom with large sliding patio doors on the left and a tatami "living room" on the right.

Here is a view of the sunroom from inside the tatami room.

This is the tatami room that we have turned into our living room

And here is a different angle of the room showing the traditional shrine alcove which has been turned into our TV corner. This is no reflection on how much importance we place on our television, but was just a nice out of the way spot for it. Theo seems pretty pumped about playing Smooth Moves. There is a big closet with double sliding doors on the back wall and a door that leads to the washing machine and shower area between the closet and the couch.

When you go through this door, you find yourself in a short hallway where the washing machine is located.

To the left of the washing machine there is a doorway that leads to the fully waterproof bath/shower area. 

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of using a Japanese bathtub, here is a closer look at it. It is not as long the bathtubs we have in the West, but much deeper. It is about 50 cm deep so you can immerse much more of your body in the water. 

It also has a complicated and new fangled set of controls that allows you to adjust the temperature, fill the tub at the touch of a button, and circulate the water in the bathtub through a heater that maintains it at the same temperature throughout your bath. Also, the water can be saved and reheated in the future to whatever temperature you like by pressing a button. This might seem strange, but since you fully scrub yourself down before getting in, the water is clean enough to save for the next bath. 

The thing that attracted us to this house was the perfect blending of old and new. We are guessing that it was built during the post war reconstruction period, which puts it at about 60 - 65 years old. There are a lot of aspects that have been kept in their original state, like the large, deep genkan, or entranceway, the worn wooden stairs and landing, the deep windowsills, and old exposed timbers. However, much of the inside has been completely updated. In the few months before we moved in, the windows were all replaced, all interior walls and doors were repapered, new wooden flooring was put in the kitchen and dining room, new tatami was laid, all new cabinets, sinks, and counters were put into the kitchen and bathroom, a new western style toilet complete with a washlet was installed, and the shower room and bathtub were replaced. In other words, it is like living in a completely new house, but without the impersonal, plastic, modular feel of most new houses in Japan. We get to enjoy the history and layout of a traditional Japanese home without any of the inconvenience or deterioration that usually accompanies a 65 year old structure.   

That's enough house touring for now. Next time we will find out what lies beyond the right hand door and up the stairs! 

Home Sweet Home

view from the street

It has been almost a month since we moved to our new place. We have all settled in well and are really enjoying the extra space and privacy. Our neighbours, who are all elderly, are extremely curious and friendly and are always stopping by to drop off a vegetable or two from their garden and to chat with the kids. The only snag we have run into is with our internet. After waiting four weeks, we were called by the internet provider and told, for some reason we couldn't quite understand, that our house can't be hooked up to their system. We now have to figure out some way of getting internet, either by changing the type of internet we will receive or going with a completely different company. Either way, it means that we will be waiting at least another 1 - 2 months for internet. This will be the longest that we have been without internet service in over 10 years and has been a bit of an adjustment not being able to use Wikipedia to settle our ever occurring disputes and feeling cut off from our friends and family back home. Our friends in the area have been generous in letting us use their internet when we need it, so I am going to make a point to put a blog post more often than not in spite our solitary confinement.

peering through the fence that Dustin built

So here is the catch up on what we have been keeping ourselves busy with in the past month. The first two weeks in June were spent unpacking and getting our yard set up.  Before we came, the yard was a patch of bare earth with an opening to the street and two bushes. Our first order of business was to build a fence to close off the yard and keep the children from running into the street. Dustin attracted the attention of all the old men in the neighbourhood while he built it. They kept stopping by periodically to see how far he had gotten and give him advice and praise. While he did that, I made a flower bed by the front window and a vegetable patch in the side yard and got all of the assorted plants from our apartment balcony into the ground. I also got our compost bin set up which pleased me to no end. Those of you who don't compost may think I am crazy, but for those who do, I think you share my inexplicable joy in watching food scraps decompose.

digging out the smallest of the three tree roots

The second weekend in June was taken up by removing three stumps from the yard, building a bike shelter, and planting grass. Some of our fantastic friends came over and with their help hard work we were able to get everything done in a weekend. We had hoped to put sod down on our yard since we didn't have much space to cover and didn't want to go through all of the time and hassle of growing grass seed. When we went to buy it however, there was only a few small, half dead bundles left in all of the garden centers we went to. The sod here is very different than what we are used to in North America. Here they sell a stack of eight 30 cm x 30 cm squares tied in a bundle. The sod that we bought had been sitting for over a month at the garden center so it did not look too great by the time we got it. When we bought sod in Canada, it was cut that day and rolled into big healthy green rectangles that were about 60 cm x 150 cm. Not many people plant grass in Japan, or have very much space to do so, and this was reflected in the health and quantity of sod available. So in the end we sprinkled grass seed over 3/4 of the yard and put the half dead sod on the remaining 1/4. We were pretty lucky that the weather turned drizzly for a week and a half afterwards and I didn't have to waste water while the seeds were germinating.

our baby grass growing in

The bike shelter that Dustin built has a living roof on the top of it. We still need to put a bit more soil up there and plant some nice hearty succulents in it. 

the top of the bike shelter waiting to be planted

There are still a few more things that we would like to do outside, but for the most part it is just being patient until the new grass fills in. As a point of reference, here is a picture that I took before we moved in and another of nearly the same angle that I took yesterday:

Before

After

Sometime soon I will take some shots of the inside of our place and put them up. After only four weeks it really is starting to look and feel like home!