Overpriced Highball for the Big Guy

I keep falling asleep at my desk and waking up all groggy and surly in the middle of night, stumbling downstairs to brush my teeth without waking anyone, and slinking back up the steps and into bed. So I was the last one up again this morning, but I made up for it by quickly getting ready and taking the boys out on a Sunday morning walk to look for bugs.

Kenzo has been particularly keen on capturing another lizard. He doesn't understand that lizard season is ending and those guys are becoming more and more rare.

He got his hopes up when we came across a little one walking up some woodsy steps.

After that we took a break.

Eri's sister and her husband stopped by to grab the car seats that the boys just graduated from. Their little girl Emika is just now big enough to start using one and next spring she's gonna have a brand new baby brother or sister who will also need a car seat, so the timing worked out nice for all of us.

Emika apparently loves Thomas the Tank Engine (who doesn't?), so the boys brought out their Thomas storybooks and I read one for her. It's in English so Eri's sister and her husband were taking tons of pictures and oohing and aahing. She seemed to like the story. It was Thomas and the Beanstalk, one of our favorites. It's where Thomas spills some magic beans and a beanstalk grows up to the sky, conveniently with railroad tracks winding around it. Without those tracks the story would end on page three.

Tempting as it was, I didn't start talking about bilingual language development and the importance of daily comprehensible input, the affective filter, and reading time.

We had to say farewell and dash out to catch the bus down to Izumi Chuo for our second Vegalta match in as many weeks. Today was particularly packed because the Tokyo team Sendai was playing is pretty good and their fans show up.

The game was at 14:00, which meant no nap time for the boys. They got a bit restless. Luckily the stadium sells overpriced ice cream for the little guys and overpriced highballs for the big guys.

Before catching the bus home we stopped for an early dinner at Hummingbird in Selva Terrace. They apparently serve complimentary beers on Vegalta game days if you show your ticket. Gotta remember that for the future.

For as grumpy, restless, and tired as the boys get when we have long days out, they always rebound when a basket of toys is brought out for them to choose from. That, and their dinner came with... ice cream. Two ice creams in one day. Sometimes their aunties or grandmas spoil them, and sometimes the world does.

Comments

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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