What a party!

It was a great, if weird, party.

Midori and Lisa-chan and Hiromi's husband and Ayumu showed up right on time (3:30 -- everything in Japan seems to start on time, which would be fine in my old life, but tougher these last, oh, 3.5 years). Hiromi's husband didn't stay long, and the kids just played and snacked and we waited for Tomoko and her sons, Taiki and Keita, to arrive at 4 (she had let me know she couldn't arrive until then... it's not like she was, you know, running LATE.). It some ways it was like any party or group of kids together -- playing, running around, checking things out, even sharing. Jack, Kate and Liv really seemed to like having other kids in the house, and it was fun to see them showing their toys and things to their new friends.

In other ways, it was an odd party. It was so quiet, for one thing. So unbelievably quiet. Probably it was the language barrier, but also I suppose there was a certain shyness because all the friends were new. At one point, Jack went up to John and asked if he thought kids were having fun. They were -- it just took a while, and wasn't noisy.

But we did a Halloween project (decorating felt pumpkins) and and the kids played with toys, dressed up in crowns and scarves and bandanas and ate and were kids -- and there was lots of smiles throughout.

The moms talked about poor Hiromi (with Tomoko translating), who still hasn't had the baby but will stay in the hospital again tonight, and poor Ayumu, who misses his mom terribly and whose whole world is in the midst of changing.

Tomoko and Midori both brought cakes, and all three families came with goodie bags for all the kids, and with the treat bags we found -- well, there was A LOT of candy at the end.

At some points later that night, as John and I cleaned up and listened to the kids buzzing with excitement and sugar, I couldn't find the girls... it turns out they had taken the bowl of Doritos and camped out in the entry, munching with crowns on. Because, you know, they clearly hadn't had enough junk food in the previous 90 minutes!

A little while later, the three of them all put on rainboots and grabbed bags and went outside to ring out doorbell and shout TRICK OR TREAT. We added some more candy to their bags (by that point, why bother limiting it?) and called it a night.

These are three happy kids. They have been flying high all night (and it can't just be the sugar).

We ended up with great decorations thanks to John's good find at a grocery store with the kids today and the fortuitous arrival this morning of a care package from my dear childhood friend and her family, Susie (we shared the candy corns -- they were a HIT!). And while I don't consider myself a crafty person (at least not in the arts-and-crafts sense)... the crowns and felt pumpkins were pretty darn impressive, if I may say so myself.

Here are some more pictures of the day, including one of me with my electronic dictionary, the kids being silly in the morning earlier this week.

Happy Halloween!

Prepping for a party

Our big Halloween party is this afternoon and the kids can't wait.

It's not an easy task to prepare for a party in a country where the holiday is not really celebrated. John asked his students this week if they did anything for Halloween, or recognized the day in any way, or understood why there are a few orange and black decorations at the grocery store and mall. They had no clue except for recognizing jack-o-lanterns and such from their middle school English textbooks. I think the kids coming to the party are curious as well. We will do our best to share the joy of candy and costumes with them and probably not spend as much time, this time, talking about the undead and pagan holidays and all of that (maybe next time we're in Japan we can tackle that!).

We will have orange food (carrots, satsumas, orange juice and orange Doritos) and play Ghost in the Graveyard (I will ask Tomoko and John to translate). I couldn't find construction paper for decorations anywhere, and Hiromi volunteered to look for some for me, but instead went to the hospital last night to have her baby (Ayumu's dad, whom we haven't met, will drop him at the party, as it's all Ayumu has been talking about for a week). So we made little ghosts out of kleenix balls and dress-up crowns out of our cardboard recycling and tinfoil (they actually turned out pretty well!). I found some felt at the 100 yen store (like a dollar store) and made some felt pumpkins and different shapes the kids can put on it, and I found orange bandanas there, too, so kids can dress up as cowboys or pirates or anything else. I had wanted to make a cake or cookies, but we only have a broiler and my one attempt at making cookies was a quickly burnt disaster.

We'll take lots of pictures, of course, and let you know how it goes.

In other news -- I made the startling discovery yesterday that the bag of what I thought was white sugar (which I had just put on my plain yogurt, fruit, and granola), was actually salt. Yeah... not a good taste (especially as generously as I had "sugared" my yogurt.) I could have sworn I had picked up the same bag as I had last time at the store.

And good news for Katie -- she reported that she didn't spit on ANYONE at school this week. Now that's something every parent loves to hear. The school is preparing for some kind of performance which is, we now understand, a BIG DEAL. For one thing, they are practicing songs and dances all the time at school. Costumes are filling up the classrooms. And we were sent with a list of more things to buy for the kids (white tights, including for Jack, a white long sleeved t-shirt, and camisoles for the girls... Maiko from HGU had first translated the last item as singlets, which confused us... so John brought in the girls' leotards to learn they are NOT singlets... so she looked up more words and decided on camisoles.) Of course, all of these items will need to be marked with their names.

Anyway, this list took us for the first time to the underwear section of our favorite (affordable) children's department store and I have to say -- Japanese kids' underwear is AWESOME. So unbelievably soft -- like a different kind of cotton all together. And very clever. It is clear that it will get cold and snowy here and I found so many great footless tight, long underwear, tops, etc, and all of this amazingly soft cotton. I will need to head back (and check out the adult section, too). It did make me want to buy underwear for all of the kids we know in the world, which John said is just a little weird. Maybe... but it was SO soft!

OK. Off to shop for the party. Hope to be back with a good report later tonight. Happy Halloween!

Oh spit

Last night at dinner, Katie mentioned to me that she spit at a girl at school. I was surprised and mentioned something about how we don't spit at other people. Livie piped up that the girl had taken Katie's toy, and the girl wasn't even supposed to be playing with toys then, she was supposed to be coloring, and Katie tried to get her toy back and when she couldn't, she spit at the girl (nice to have a sister to come to your defense with play-by-play action). The girl, Katie added, spit right back at her.

This led me to ask Hiromi today for a couple of kid-friendly phrases that we could teach the kids so that they could tell someone "stop that" or ask someone for help (John's are all a bit long and very polite). So all night, we have been practicing "da-me" (no, stop), "bat-ten" (a more gentle form of no, stop), "tetsu dau " (help me), and "shiranai" (I don't understand). While spitting, we told Katie, is generally not an acceptable form of communication, we realized we hadn't armed her with any other way of letting the girl know of her wishes to keep playing with that toy (or anything else besides thank you, good morning, yes, and goodbye). We'll see how it goes tomorrow. I REALLY hope the teachers didn't see. I can't imagine that conversation from the teacher to the HGU people to John... it wouldn't be good from anyone's perspective.

And we're seeing an interesting side-effect from all of this language immersion (they are getting a lot of Japanese, of course, but French at home as I attempt, poorly, to keep up with Jack's schoolwork). Katie and Livie have just started making up words (and sentences and songs and stories). A lot. There are some words they use consistently (mufasa=run fast) and others that seem to change with their moods. Often, Katie will say "Sing this French song with me. If you don't know the words, you can just do the dancing" and then dive into a five minute vocal rendition of, well, something. They understand that different words can be used to talk about the same thing (the moon, hello, thank you) and are making up their own language because, I guess, they can. It's kind of fun to see.

Tomorrow I hope to post a bunch of the pictures from Jay and Judy's visit. We had a WONDERFUL time and were very sad to see them leave today. John and I got in THREE dates/dinners out (figuring we won't get any more until we're back in Lethbridge!) and the kids loved showing them the subway, their backyard, the river, and everything about our interesting life here. Katie's meltdowns, which had started to decrease just before they came, continued to decrease in number and intensity... and she just seems a lot happier in general. Hopefully, she is starting to feel a bit more settled in.

Oh -- and the big news (from the kids' perspective) -- we decided to have a Halloween party on Friday with four friends. It will be the highlight of their social season!

Language, too much and too little

So, we get lots of letters from the kids' school in Japanese and usually take them to Maiko or Kunihara, the wonderful HGU people who help us, to translate. Usually they are not very important. We got one yesterday that John read as well as he could -- it said, he thought, that each child needed to bring two rolls of toilet paper to school. Weird, but OK. Maybe things are tight and the kids are going through more TP than the school had budgeted for. So I picked up a six pack at the store last night, and John dutifully brought it to school today. They looked confused. He looked confused. Turns out, they simply were asking for two toilet paper rolls -- the cardboard ends of a roll, that is -- for a craft project.

We brought the toilet paper home, and now need to go through those six rolls as quickly as possible (at least we have seven people in the house this week to help!).

Everyone we meet is amazed at how good John's Japanese is -- but it is clearly not quite fluent enough in preschool terms (those 19th century religious terms just aren't coming up very much!). I have no such problem. I am having such a hard time learning Japanese. It just isn't sticking. I don' t know if it's because of the different lettering system (romanji, or Roman letters, plus katakana, hirigana, and kanji), or because I am almost twice as old as I was when I went to France, or because I have been sleep deprived the last few years, but I am having a such a hard time. Nothing is sticking. I still forget the word for twins. ALL THE TIME. And people say it to me, and I look it up, and belatedly remember it ALL THE TIME (it's futago, by the way, but if you were to ask me that on the street I wouldn't remember 9 times out of 10). And I forget the number four, for some reason, so when ordering, I have to get 1,2,3 or 5 of whatever it is I need (good thing we don't need to buy new tires for a car!). I can get by, as most people know some English and I have my dictionary and apologies... but it hit me just how poorly I am doing when we went out to eat the other night (found a wonderful French restaurant across the street and grandparents to watch little ones) and the restaurant owner and John were working slowly through the menu in Japanese and then the owner asked if we spoke French. It turns out he did his training in Lyon, not far from where I lived when I was there. And from that point on, I was able to converse so comfortably with him then -- it all came back, and I could be funny and polite and make my needs known. It was such a pleasure talking to him, the Japanese chef, in French, about factual things (our dinner choice) and interesting things (how long he had the restaurant, where we came from and why we are there) and everything else. On the way home, I realized how many conversations I am NOT having because I am so slow in learning Japanese. There are missed conversations with teachers, with friends, with the woman checking me out at the store and the person at the coffee shop. Some of this quiet is probably good -- time to reflect and all -- but I do miss some of the more pleasant parts of human conversation!

And oh, the missed conversation with teachers... well, it turns out that we had two events at the kids' school today (observing the girls' gym class and having lunch with the moms of students in Jack's class) -- but I had sort of combined both in my head as the lunch... and so today, when I got there, I saw the girls in gym class with TONS of parents and grandparents watching and dancing and videotaping... and we had completely forgotten. I went in for the last three minutes, which was actually worse and made Katie sad to have to leave... and then found out we had missed Jack's gym day last week as well. The teacher tried to remind John this morning -- but when she talked about an event today, he said "yes, Lisa is coming" -- thinking it was the mother's lunch. Ah, confusion all around. Luckily, Jack said he didn't even know why all those people were in gym class last week, so he didn't really wonder where we were. Hopefully the girls won't be scarred permanently either.

The lunch with the other mothers was nice -- I sat with a woman who spent a year working in Banff and so she knows a lot of English (yay!). The teacher came in part way through with lots of updates that Tomoko occasionally translated for me. I was thinking how nice that kind of a thing would be at schools in Lethbridge -- a chance to talk with other parents (in this case it was all mothers) and to ask the teacher things informally.

We are heading out of town tomorrow until Saturday night with Jay and Judy -- we are going to a different water slide/ Japanese hot springs hotel in a beautiful area. It has been SO good having them here -- they are getting to see a lot of Sapporo and have been helping so much with the kids (and the dishes, and the kids, and did I mention how great it is that they have been helping with the kids, those same kids who were driving me a bit crazy?!?!)

Can't wait for the waterslides!

Overheard in our house

Kate and Liv: "Mean Doggie, where are you? Mean doggie?"
John: "Mean Doggie is in the bathroom."
Jack: "Girls," he says, exasperated, "my name is Bad Hyena!" (like, duh....)

Humor in translation, and another head wound for Katie

Just two quick stories about miscommunication. First, at the park yesterday, there were two moms with two kids playing who asked if the girls were twins and told me how old their kids were. I meant to tell them, in Japanese, that Jack was six and Kate and Liv were three. Instead, I told them Jack was six, and Kate and Liv were "third generation" -- that their grandparents were Japanese (sansei instead of sansai). John overheard me and laughed quietly as they stared, tilted their heads and tried to see the Japanese influence on these fair-haired kids.

Shortly after, we were at the grocery store. As I walked by the pizza display, I saw something that had been eluding me since I found the cheese shop -- a good cheese grater. It was a small, silver grater with four sides and sizes... just right (I have bought two graters that are really for vegetables and mangle our precious cheese). So I put it in my basket. When I was checking it, the checker scanned it and it didn't register. I get the sense that NEVER happens in Japan. She did it again, and nothing registered. Looks of horror came over her face. Someone came over and they talked and I got the sense they were asking where I found it. I mentioned, lamely, "pizza?". One said "Ah, pizza corner!" "Hai (yes)," I said. So one ran off while the other continued to ring me out. A second later, I realized I had probably plucked the grater out of a display. Meekly, I took out my dictionary, looked up the word for decoration and showed the checker. Ah-ha, she said. "Sumimasen," I said (I'm sorry -- one of the few phrases I have down pat). The first checker came back with the same discovery and apologies that I could not buy the display grater... I think she said I could get one at the big market downtown....I just repeated Sumimasen and hurried off with my groceries.

Anyway.

In other news -- Jay and Judy safely arrived last night, and the kids actually let them sleep til 8:30 this morning. They are SO excited to see them (as are we all... but John and I tend not to squeal quite as much.) The kids and I took them to Odori Park downtown (John has to submit the book tonight) where we had a great time... until Katie ran out of the bathroom straight into the path of a bike. None of us actually saw it happen, but I came out of the bathroom to find Katie with a VERY bloody nose, a new knot between her eyes and lots of sobs. The woman on the bike had a child with her and was mopping Katie's nose along with Judy when I saw her. At first, I thought she was just stopping to help but then I figured out that she had run into Katie (or Katie had run into her). Poor babe. She seems OK... with my dictionary, I was able to figure out what happened (sort of... she and her kid are OK, and she said Katie didn't hit her head when she fell. There was much apologizing from everyone.). Katie said it's a "medium hurt." As we continued on after snacks, cuddles, and a bit of washing up, Liv ran off in front of her. Katie screamed out "Careful Wiv... that bike is coming! Slow down!" Thankfully, sister heard sister and all was well.

Here are some pictures of the last few days -- Jack getting 100 yen from the tooth fairy, cleaning for Grandma and Grandpa, and our day at the park. The last one, sadly, is another head wound for Katie.

Saturday with the kids

John has a book deadline on Monday morning, plus the usual class prep, so I took the kids by myself downtown to Sapporo Station to the cheese stop (two small bags of cheddar and a small package of goat cheese... $20. The pleasure... priceless) and on a few other errands. I had the stroller and three kids by myself -- a challenge for sure. I carried the stroller down the two flights of stairs of our subway stop, and Jack held his sisters' hands. Then when we got to the escalator, I took Liv's hand (and had the double stroller folded up on my shoulder) and Jack took Kate's hand and we made it safely down. Coming home was another story... we had two escalators and this time I had to carry Katie and the stroller, so Jack took Liv's hand. Each time, Liv stepped on a crack/new step and fell over. Each time I had visions of one of those horrible-death-by-escalator stories I have read about over the years (OK, maybe horrible for a foot or hand or hair... but nightmares all the same). But each time, Liv and Jack were calm, and Liv just sat down, got her bearings, and stood up. Whew.

There are elevators at various places, but they are not always easy to get up, and it seems that most people ride the subway with strollers folded up unless it isn't very busy. Anyway -- we made it, and had grilled cheese for dinner to celebrate.

Yesterday, we went to the English preschool Ayumu goes to. The kids LOVED it. There were just three kids in the Friday class, and two teachers (nice ratio!). We are thinking of maybe having the kids go on Fridays... it is just two hours and the ease they showed there -- the way they played and talked to the teachers -- it was great to see. If not formally, we might just drop in from time to time, too.

And here are a few more photos from an earlier bike trip to a new park earlier this week. Olivia was wearing her SuperGirl Olivia cape (made by Maya for Liv's 2nd birthday)... she wears it all over Sapporo, and I do wonder what people think...















Jack is very at ease on two wheels, starting and stopping.



You might also notice another bandage on Katie's head... on one of our park trips, she was running quickly and just tripped, embedding a tiny rock in her head (which I was able to remove with little fuss, thankfully).














































Oh, and I had been meaning to write that some people have said they are having trouble posting comments. I am not sure what that is about, but it has happened with several different people. You can just email me or John at any of the usual addresses and we will get the message. Also -- if you want to blow these photos up, you can just double click on them.

That's all for now -- goodnight!