Skip to main content

Bed Making

Osamu has been "helping" me with morning bed-making recently.


I love to make the beds in the morning. Eri doesn't get it. She's perfectly content to crawl into a bed at night that is exactly as she left it in the morning. I can't do that. For several reasons. The main reason, I think, is that making my bed (and in my case also making the boys' beds while they're still too little to do it themselves) signals to my mind that I have completed the first of many tasks for the day. 

Plus the house looks and feels nice. I like walking past the bedroom and seeing a made bed at 2 in the afternoon. It gives me a feeling of pleasure living in a house where the beds are made.

Eri told me that when I'm away on business trips or whatnot she doesn't make the beds. I think she just told me that because she knew it would make me crazy. Touché.

At any rate Osamu loves it when I toss papa and mama's big fluffy comforter and fuzzy blanket on the bedroom floor so I can properly fix the bed up nicely. He does a backwards dive into it and giggles like crazy.

I'm like the dad from Finding Nemo sometimes, though. I worry too much. I constantly think the boys are gonna crack their heads against the window sill and I have to restrain myself, mostly unsuccessfully, from telling them to be careful. 

I tell myself nearly daily that I have to stop telling the boys to be careful. Little boys shouldn't be careful. They should be carefree. Once they become self-aware enough they can be careful. I gotta protect them from cracking their heads and all the other stuff, but I also need to protect them from my psychological stress by knocking it off with the be careful talk.

If there's one time in your life when it's okay to not be careful and to explore and not worry about needless things it's when you're four and you're on an adventure with your brother who's six. Your mom and dad can be careful for you. 


My bottle of Angostura Bitters that I bought 11 years ago officially ran out tonight. I've made many Old Fashioneds with that. The dilemma now... buy another bottle? If I keep the same pace of drinking Old Fashioneds the next one will run out when I'm nearly 60 years old. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...