Spring Break Day Two

Another example of a day that turned out quite different from what I had planned, in a rather lovely way!

First of all, yesterday my kids and their two friends came here to play and I took Erica up for a nap. I did NOT nap myself, but did budgets and planning for the break. Erica woke up, the guests went home, Kanji arrived home and we all got dressed and ready to go to Max's birthday party - I will add another post with photos and videos from that, suffice it to say it was fantastic, the most fun I've had at a kid's party for a long time! Of course, it's only foreign parents who have them so that limits the amount I attend! After cooking up a storm at my own parties, it was nice to sit back and not have to do a thing - plus Ana played some very energetic games with the kids, which was really fun to watch! And I suppose sitting at the bar drinking beers and controlling the sound system with my iphone helped.

The plan then, for today, was to take Erica to her 3&1/2 year health check. I dropped Amy and Lena off at the Haradas before I went. I'm a pro at this now, and it went very smoothly. I don't how much of it is that I just know it's going to take a while, or if they have got more efficient at it (they used to be in a different location each time, rotating around community centres, but now they are always in the one public health centre, so perhaps that's enabled them to streamline the system a bit). Also, there tend to be less mums at the 3.5 year check than at the small baby checks. We were finished in 90mins. Height, weight, eyes, ears, teeth okay. The only problem was her not being able to do up buttons, which I thought was not significant. I brought up my worries about her still transposing consonants (try saying that in Japanese!) eg 'kolawa' for 'koala', or 'daibozu' for 'daijobu(ok)' (which is actually quite funny as it sounds like she is saying 'Big Buzzcut') but they didn't seem too worried about that. Only one of them blamed her bilingualism for it, but even then she didn't see it as a problem.

I drove her home on the levee, which she found quite exciting, if a little scary. When we reach the bridges, we come down off the levee and pass under the road, and whenever we did that, she'd sigh with relief and go 'Thank you Mum!'. Then when we came back up again, I'd hear her sharp intake of breath and she'd say 'careful' or 'don't falling' or 'water, water'.

Once home, I got a phone call from illahee, who had cut short her visit to GW due to Ryu being sick. So she decided to pop in and see us on the way home. I then called Amy and Lena to pick them up, the plan being that the H. girls would come too. Amy told me Yuuki was going to come too, and Maki would bring everyone. She came in too, so my quiet afternoon cleaning out the toy closet suddenly became a mini-party with three mums, nine kids and the contents of last night's party's pinata!

I FORGOT to go to work.

Nobody noticed... I guess they are all busy with their relocations this week anyway.