Skip to main content

Narrow Window

I stay up too late. Last night I was up way past midnight and even dozed off on the hot carpet for a while before resuming my reading, writing, and YouTube watching.

Which leads to sleeping late in the morning. The boys came up and crawled into bed with me and snuggled for a while. They had just finished breakfast. I looked at the clock. It was after eight.

The boys helped me make the bed and we headed downstairs and I whipped up a little breakfast that perfectly suits me: natto with kimchi. We were out of eggs. A raw egg on this would've made it perfect.


I spent the morning at the community center meeting with the neighborhood association, which as of April I will be the vice chair of. No one else wants to do it so I was fast-tracked. I'm excited, though. We talked about the upcoming year's activities, such as cleaning the parks and planting flowers. I greatly value knowing our neighbors and surrounding community members. Eri is worried that I'll get too busy and stressed out, but I think it'll be fine. Plus Kenzo can join me for a lot of the activities like flower planting and grass cutting.

It is a time commitment, however. This morning the meeting started at 10 and I got home close to noon. Eri texted me earlier that she and the boys hopped on the bus to Izumi Chuo to return library books and have lunch, so I did some household chores I've been meaning to do for a while, like washing crayon marks off the boys' bedroom wall, and headed out for a walk.

There was not a cloud in the sky.


And the boys were super excited to ride the bus, as always.



Late Sunday afternoon always means park time.


I am fully aware (I think) that these guys are going to eventually start having their own lives, their own friends, their own interests, and that those things probably won't involve me or Eri. I know this is a special time. Kenzo and Osamu love being with mama and papa, but I know it won't be like that forever. The window is narrow.


Which is why, for the time being, nothing is more important than playing at the park, wrestling in the living room, and goofing off in the bathtub.

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...