Very White Very Quickly

My favorite time of the day is reading stories for Kenzo and Osamu before bed time. Even when I'm exhausted from everything, especially the crazy evenings with Eri gone at her web design class, story time is when I can sit down with the boys and attempt to carry us all away into some fanciful other place to experience an existence a little different than ours for the sole purpose of enjoyment.

For the last three evenings there has been no story time, however. A record. Eri read the boys a Japanese storybook one night, but papa has been sitting out. The reason is because story time before bed is a privilege, not a right. There has been some pervasive bad behavior in the evenings that has led to some draconian measures, like no bedtime stories.

I get it, of course. The boys get excited and hyperactive and it causes them to sometimes get hyper emotional as well. Kenzo is especially susceptible to saying things in the heat of his six-year-old emotional roller coaster. For example, "Papa is mean."

I know that taking what a child says personally is not good, and I do okay at it, but I have to let the boys know that when they say hurtful things there are going to be consequences. Papa is not mean. I just want to get us all in the bath and have fun.

So story time becomes a linchpin. If everything from cleaning up toys to not fighting to listening to papa is obeyed, then we can proceed with a fun evening. If the boys get out of control and make each other cry or don't follow papa's instructions to clean up and get ready for the bath then certain privileges get revoked, and the one that hurts us all is story time. The boys love story time. For me it's the highlight of my day. The boys know that taking that away because of bad behavior hurts all of us.

After a bunch of heart to heart father son talks and some resetting of expectations, as well as some extra patience on my part, tonight was a return to our nightly tradition of reading before bedtime. It was getting late, though. Almost nine. The boys were yawning. I grabbed Kenzo's kindergarten English book and read a story from there and even sang a song. Osamu clutched his blanket the entire time.

Now I have to figure out how to replicate that and do it again tomorrow.

Today the first snow to stick fell. It snowed all afternoon and into the evening. The boys kept looking out the window and giving me reports on how white it was getting. Apparently it was getting very white very quickly

I took this video in the early afternoon when I first noticed the snow had started. And yes that's my stomach growling. I forgot to eat lunch.

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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