So Long Child Seats

This morning's car ride to the kindergarten bus stop was the last time the boys sat in child seats.

When mama picked them up from the bus stop at 14:20 they got to ride home like big dudes for the first time ever. No more child seat. Just a seatbelt attachment for little guys.

I was in an online meeting from 13:30 until after 15:00, during which Eri's mom stopped by to bring us vegetables, the boys came home from kindergarten, and Eri left for her class. My earbuds were in and I was in a state of meeting flow, so when I logged off and went downstairs to check on the boys I was a bit loopy from re-entry to the actual world I live in. The boys were sitting at the dining table eating ice cream snacks, happy as could be, swinging their feet back and forth on their chairs and laughing about something they were talking about before I entered the room.

It's the last business day of the month so I am up to my neck with bureaucratic rituals. I headed back up to my desk after unsuccessfully convincing Osamu to take a nap. I just made a mental note that he was gonna be a ticking time bomb of drama starting the moment he finishes his dinner. And ohhhh boy he didn't disappoint. After dinner he broke down and I had to go to DEFCON 5: hot towel body wipe-down, expedited tooth brushing, and straight to bed. He was out in seconds. The thumb he was sucking just went limp.

A few hours before that Osamu came moseying into my office and asked me what I was doing. I said, "Working. What are you doing?" I asked him if he wants to be tired and grumpy at bath time or if he wants to be energetic and happy so he can play with Kenzo. He couldn't decide, so he asked if he could lay down and rest on the floor of my office, to which I said yes of course. And he did.

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Mr. Blue Sky

Man, I conked out so hard on the living room floor tonight. Right after bath time, before story time. I barely remember. Completely exhausted. Big adventure day. Another in a long series I hope the boys will remember when they’re older... our first IMAX movie, a downtown city outing, and some life lessons in the game center. We left the house at 9:15 a.m. and didn’t get back until nearly 6 p.m., totally spent but full of pizza and memories. The Wild Robot in IMAX was totally stunning. The scale, the colors, the sound. We could feel every gust of wind and rustle of leaves. I made sure we had prime seats, row G, right in the center. Two big buckets of popcorn too, which, according to Kenzo and Osamu, I absolutely should not be sharing. “You should get your own!” they kept saying. I think a little bit of popcorn thievery is well within my rights as the papa. After the movie, we headed through the cold and wind across to the game center on the other side of Sendai Station. Being...

Not About Baseball

I stayed up past my bedtime again last night. I almost made it. I watched a couple of episodes of Ted Lasso and came to a good stopping point where I was satisfied with myself for enjoying some quiet TV time with my favorite show and even though it was after midnight, I was confident I could still get a pretty good night's sleep. But no. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to just lay on the living room carpet and put on a movie. I saw the first seven or eight minutes of Goodfellas and then I woke up when the end credits were rolling with Sid Vicious' is cover of My Way . I brush my teeth and I can see the light of day already shining in through the bathroom window. "It’s almost the longest day of the year," I told myself, to at least rationalize why I'm brushing my teeth and crawling into bed at this hour. I was trying to minimize the mental anguish I regularly put on myself for not just going to bed like I should. I told Eri that I was thinking a...

Sendai vs. Tokushima

Osamu said he had to go pee, and I make it a habit to believe him most of the time. Another habit I have is taking him to go pee, much of the time. When we came out of the restroom I decided it was time for a beer, so with Osamu holding my hand we waltzed over to the food concession and I was checking out the selection, and the prices. Seven hundred yen for a draft beer. I had a feeling. It was only 500 for a whiskey cocktail (whiskey with water on the rocks) but I wasn't about to be that much of a derelict this early with my four-year-old son in tow. The tickets were free, the seats aren't bad, might as well spend seven bucks on a beer. The problem was that the dude next to us with his little boy about the same age as Mumu-chan loudly and with braggadocio you don't often see in these parts ordered a Blue Hawaii snow cone for his kid. I heard this and panicked. Last weekend at Michinoku Park I got a Blue Hawaii snow cone for Osamu and he loved it. I looked down at my l...

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