It seems to have been a while, but it seems our 13 month old daughter has her third tooth, and her first one in her top jaw. The only odd thing is that this is the first one since the first pair came out at about the same time a few months ago.
OK, maybe this is only something to the three of us (not including the teeth).
Despite having been able to stand by herself, and walk with a helping hand/sofa/whatever was nearby for a while, our little daughter managed her first ‘official’ steps today. Woo!
We say ‘official’, in that it was all fully controlled with no outside help, wobbling or such – just a very neat controlled step, so congratulations to her. No we just have to await the arrival of the reins.
[Baby Blog Alert] So at the tender age of 13 months, our little offspring is experimenting with different ways of getting to bed.
In the old days I would just carry her after her last drink of the day. Not so simple now. After a week or two with experimenting with walking with some parental assistance (and of course, waving to the other parent at the same time), she has now decided that this journey could possibly be done on her little wooden four wheeled bike (though the wave stays).
We’ll see how long she prefers this.
One of the benefits of putting your offspring into a communal setting like a play group or day care, is that they get to be host to some really exciting viruses, meaning that for most of the last few weeks we’ve been treated to various forms of flu, though this week we really did pull the long straw and were hosts to a nice stomach bug, which pretty much knocked us all sideways for a few days.
Given the symptoms, our location in Japan, time of year and stories from other parents, it looks like something akin to Noro virus or the riveting sounding Rota virus. Happy times.
Well, today our little daughter, just a few days before her first birthday started her day care at a hoikuen (day care) nearby. Actually, she’s had three practice days this week, of a couple of hours a day, but today was the big test.
We both got up ‘early’, me at six, and my daughter at about six forty five, before the frenzy of feeding, nappies, grooming and cleaning and all the rest of that, and we rolled out of the apartment a little late, just after eight o clock.
The hoikuen itself is nice, and all the staff are very enthusiastic and friendly, but handing her over was just so sad.
Still, I know when my wife picked her up after a half day (we’ve managed to arrange some shift change to minimise the time in care), our daughter was quite chirpy and bouncing around as normal.
We’ve all promised to give it a couple of months, but right now it’s feeling wrong and sad to me, with the only consolation being when I come home, she welcomes me at the door the same way she ever did, so hopefully no damage done.
I’d been a while since I updated anything here. I’ve just been busy as it were. Firstly we took a family holiday back to my homeland in the north of England for the first two weeks of October, and overall, we had a great time. It’s always great to see the family and just relax into familiar surroundings.
Of course, the trip starts before you reach the destination, and for us, it was the first time travelling by air with our daughter, who is just under a year old, and just a little too big for the KLM bassinet. Despite not having the bolt on baby bed option, we did opt for those ‘front’ seats, against the central reservations, which means you get the extra leg-room you see in the exit aisles. This in itself was essential – the cabin crew were quite happy for our little one to crawl around there, and even make a small bed on the floor so she could sleep outstretched. The only downside was something we hadn’t really anticipated – people wanted to walk through our row because it was slightly wider – even with our daughter playing on the floor. This just meant it as best for one of us to stay awake, which wasn’t too much of an issue.
At Schiphol of course we had to put up with the traditional KLM fiasco: our KLM flight was 30mins late, the cabin crew said they didn’t know if there was an issue with our KLM flight to Humberside, we’d have to ask the ground staff. Obviously there are no KLM people at the gate, so we hasten to the departure gate for our connection: it’s gone. I ask at the desk what we should do. the KLM staff are smug, telling us we’ve been bumped to the next flight three hours later, and looking at me like it’s my fault their plane was late. As I said, this is classic KLM. Anyway, I made my way to the KLM transit desk, where there’s a decent selection of other people who have been bumped by KLM from their own KLM connections, and the (rather friendlier) staff are handing out packs of food vouchers, phone cards and even flight discount vouchers like they were tissues outside a Japanese rail station. Bottom line: we did get yo my home town on that later flight, and I was annoyed, but then, hey, it’s KLM.
I’ve already given that episode too many words!
I don’t want anyone to think that had any baring on the rest of the trip though – as I suggested, I think it was as expected. Now on to the holiday itself. It was wonderful spending two weeks with my parents and family, an early birthday party for our daughter, who got to spend some more time with her other two grandparents. I also got to spend a night at my old karate club, which was awesome – it’s a great place, and so if you’re a karate-ka, Shotokan or otherwise, you should pop in if you’re ever near Grimsby.
It was good to see old friends too – who all, without exception, were as fun as ever, and looking well, so thanks to the two Tims, Matt and Magda and Dave. I also managed the almost biblical feat of sorting out all my ‘stuff’ in the family loft. I say ‘sort out’, what actually happened was I spent about 24 hours over two weeks going though a load of old boxes, dumping what was irrelevant from the last thirty four years, keeping what I wanted in some newly purchased clear plastic, stackable containers and setting some aside for charity shops, which were mainly books, as I hate throwing out, or even recycling books. It was amazing just how much rubbish was up there.
The return to Japan was smooth too, and our daughter was an absolute star, she had virtually no issue on the planes, no complaints, and virtually no jet-lag, the lucky girl, so at least we know we can make these trips with her, as one side of our family suffers from very bad motion sickness (hint hint, it’s not me).
Seemingly, one of the side benefits of having a baby in Chuo-ku is that you get a free house plant as a gift. We received the application for this a couple of months ago, and I think we ordered something small. However, the plant arrived today and it was a bit … bigger … than we thought – a Dracaena Massangeana. Anyway, it looks nice in the corner.
One thing we’ve been trying with our baby is music as some kind of relaxation device. There’s the belief that Mozart is ‘good for babies’, thought I’m not sure her hearing is developed enough to really hear it, (she’s not even a month old) but I thought we’d give it a try.
Though I have a few random Mozart CDs (and that MD) there is a lot available for free legal download I discovered. Specifically I went looking for Mozart for babies, if there was such a thing. Turns out there is, and a lot of it, as well as other musical, and classical music geared for babies. It starts with the downloads from Munchkin Musical Soup downloads, but I’m sure anyone who gets into this whole thing will soon be buying Baby Bach videos, and then will likely end up with the intriguing Magic Mozart Cube, or the wannabe gangsta-esque sounding iCrib Sound System which is actually just a nasty looking iPod holder and speakers, which likely means the sound quality is awful. As everyone knows, this kind of not baby bay products, are more expensive and generally worse than their ‘adult’ equivalents. Anyway, if you want specific tunes for you kids, probably try mykidstunes.com.
Anyway, I have digressed as usual. I wanted to see whether little Momo would like the baby Mozart from Munchkin. I downloaded it, played it. It’s Mozart sprinkled with nursery rhyme styled bits, and most of the instruments are tinkly tinkly childs style; possibly not something the raving Amadeus had in mind.
Still I played it through twice. After that I wasn’t sure who was benefitting. Momo was just ignoring it, and it was driving my wife and I nuts. It’s a nice idea, but for me it fell into the same category as lift music and the covers used in a lot of karaoke places. It’s a case of you know how something should sound, but it just doesn’t quite, and ends up being annoying.
So what next, well, I decided to try Momo with real, grown up, as written by The Man himself type Mozart, and though I’m not saying she was enamoured by it, it did at least look as if she was listening. She at least stopped practicing her rapid arm movement shuriken throws she’d getting known for.
Yesterday then I wondered what other music she liked. I decided against Pantera’s ‘Vulgar Display of Power’, and try something more relaxed, and settled on Miles Davis’ ‘Round About Midnight’. I have to say, I think that worked even better than Mozart. She listened for a while before slowly falling asleep (victory!). either way, she seems to like it a lot more than my singing.
(I’m not too sure how this sits after a Linux distro update, but here goes.)
Despite my rather minimal post to announce the arrival of our wonderful daughter, I can say that I’ve been absolutely deluged with cards, e-mails, some gifts and a huge amount of general encouragement for her, and the family as a whole which has been great. Thanks for that.
I’ve also been asked to put the odd comment on here about how things are going, and what we’ve been up to and such, rather than send out bulk mailings, which despite my best efforts always seem to leave someone off, and then that person gets the mail forwarded somehow, and I get a mail which says’ “Hey, put me on the cc: list!”, so here’s a couple of morsels on the ‘internet’.
She’s been home for almost two weeks now, and so far we think we’re not doing too badly. There’s been some trial and error, some things have worked better than expected, some things haven’t. On the subject of looking for advice I guess I should quote Dave W.’s sage words:
“My advice is to ignore all advice and do what feels natural and best for
you. Of course based on my own advice, please feel free to ignore
this…….”
On the paperwork side, I went down to the Kuyakusho to register Momoko formally, with the objective of making sure that her legal name in Japan is correct, as the middle name has family meaning and I wanted it in there (generally speaking, Japanese only have two names). I thought this was going to be quite difficult, but after a quick chat with the people at the Chuo-ku ward office, it turned out to not be very difficult at all, and she was all duly registered. Of course the extended story here is that the form from the hospital was actually incorrect as my wife had been told to write my name where it should have been her name, and our dual nationality where she’d been told to write only my nationality. To add to the fun, there was a box at the top which should’ve had our daughter’s name in it which we’d been told not to fill in previously, so I had to sit there, and under the coaching of three Ward employees, and in my neatest kanji, write her name. Luckily I’d been practicing.
Back to the home front, and she seems a very content little baby thus far. She’s gaining weight, quite likes sleeping for four hours at night at a stretch (sometimes more so we have to wake her for some milk). She has the feisty side I mentioned too. She’s unafraid of voicing discontent (loudly) when required and thinks nothing of evacuating her bowels over her Dad’s hand whilst he’s cleaning up an existing situation. Par for the course.
She’s smiling, and for some reason is fascinated by looking in the wardrobe. She likes listening to Mozart (apparently), and enjoys Dad walking her round. In fact she loves listening to me talk to her so much it’s almost guaranteed to get her to sleep (this is a trick I learned at work).
Some things are a surprise though; I honestly never thought I’d have an opinion on the relative quality of nappies （おむつ）and bum wipes (おしりふき). What I will say is that Japan has the best names for nappy products: Goon, Merries, Mooney. These are product which beg attention.
Right now we’re on Merries nappies, having tried Pampers, but having been unimpressed for the price (20%+ more), but I’m told Pampers are better when she gets bigger. Merries bum wipes are awful though. We liked the Momo ones we got from the hospital, but that may be due to the name.
Fortunately the wife is doing well also, and loving being a Mum, so much so she hasn’t mentioned the quality of my cooking at any point (I’m doing all the cooking right now). Even that omelette. For me it’s been good to be able to wrest the kitchen from her for a while, as we both like to cook and previous to being heavily pregnant, it was a draw to see who would get in the kitchen to cook. The wife is very good from a recipe book; I’m good at looking at disparate ingredients in the fridge and coming up with something usually quite decent from them. I knew I’d hit the jackpot last week when she, as a purveyor of excellent pasta dishes, admitted that mine ‘was quite good’ I knew my life is complete.
An ongoing debate right now is whether to buy a camcorder (which is something I’ll leave to a separate tech posting on brightblack maybe), and how to distribute some of the pictures (about a hundred at least) we already have of offspring #1. The answer is that they’re in a gallery linked from Brightblack, but you’ll need a login to see them. If you haven’t received one, let me know, and I’ll sort it out.
OK, I think that’s about enough for this post. Indeed during it’s writing I’ve changed a nappy and walked her around a bit, so it’s almost time for me to sort out dinner, and in reply to a friend of mine who asked if this would make me warm and fuzzy to vendors in my job…yes, of course it will. And Grimsby Town will win the F.A cup this season (they just fired their manager last month).
