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At Some Point

Kenzo's been on a writing craze recently. He writes letters to me, to Eri, and he's gearing up to write letters to his friends for when he starts back to kindergarten on Tuesday.

This letter to mama today had me a little perplexed at first. Then I realized he switched directions midway. He wrote left to right for the first three lines and then the fourth line is right to left and the fifth line left to right. 


I love that he is not concerned with form or rules and I talked with Eri tonight about how important I think it is to foster that. Penmanship, grammar, spelling - those are all things we naturally get better with over time. Confidence, tenacity, self-esteem - those seem to me to be things that need to be nurtured and cared for, because unlike scholarly learning they're not automatic. I might point out to Kenzo that his writing is a little off, but I won't make him feel bad about it. There's no reason. He's learning. 

He writes to me in English and to mama in Japanese. I am deeply curious about how he rationalizes that given that even though he sorta gets that mama and papa are different that way, he regularly observes Eri speaking English and me speaking Japanese.

It's the middle of a three-day weekend so I figured it was as a good time as any to do another boys adventure. This morning we waved bye to mama and headed first to Sendai Airport.

Osamu has been an excellent escalator rider for a while, but his big brother is just now getting the hang of it. They both did great on the airport escalators today. 


I'm pretty sure all airports in Japan have this - a rooftop observation deck. Sendai's rooftop even does a beer garden in the summer months. 


We got to the roof of Sendai Airport just in time for a whole bunch of planes to take off and land while we had snack time. 




After the airport we got back in the car and drove about thirty minutes north toward the Sendai Port area.


And went to our first cat cafe.


Kenzo has been saying for a long time that he loves cats. He gets super excited seeing cats in the neighborhood and even asked specifically for a cat stuffed animal for Christmas, which he sleeps with every night.


But today when he was faced with entering a room with about fifteen real live cats who have nothing better to do than be curious about their visitors he froze up. 


It took about ten minutes for him to get inside the room and get relatively comfortable. Thirty minutes for the three of us, complete with an all-you-can-drink self service juice and coffee bar, was twenty bucks, so I told Kenzo he better hurry up and start enjoying some felines pronto.




We rounded out the day with some quality living room time while mama prepared dinner.


Chicken legs and sushi. Heaven.


This morning I was going about my usual routine of making beds and opening up curtains and windows upstairs when I walked past the boys' room. As usual. But today I stopped and stared and thought about what their room is going to look like a year from now, ten years from now. They will probably want separate rooms at some point. Maybe. I hope not. I hope when they're in high school they still enjoy sleeping in their bunk beds.


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