Skip to main content

Hard Work

Yesterday evening while I was getting the boys' dinner ready (Eri does all the prep before she heads out for her class) Kenzo called me over and said look at this. He wrote his name by himself in hiragana, and he was pretty proud. I was too. 

He goes through phases weekly and even daily. Right now he's in a writing/drawing/coloring phase, and I love it. He knows I can produce coloring sheets in my office. Any coloring sheet that his little heart desires. Over the last 48 hours he has come to me a bunch of times and requested Cars 2 coloring sheets. He loves Cars. I do too. He's getting good at coloring, and this morning he was hard at work on his creations.

He loves mama the most and he doesn't miss a chance to show off his work to her.


Auntie Grace, in all her graciousness, babysat the boys for a few hours again today. She does that about once a month. No charge. She just likes it. Eri and I are so thankful for her friendship and her generosity. The boys love Auntie Grace. She spoils them like an auntie should, even though she doesn't have to. 

Eri and I are spoiled too. We get three hours pretty much every month to "get away". I don't want to "get away" from the boys, though. It's just time for us to be able to talk and reflect as adults without distraction. If the boys ever thought mama and papa were trying to get away from them I'd be destroyed.

However, when Auntie Grace came over this morning, after he calmed a bit of his excitement, Osamu pushed me to the front hall saying, "Papa you go now!"

Eri and I ventured over to a cafe I discovered in a magazine I was reading while I was waiting for a haircut recently. It's in the backwoods of Izumi. Country roads. She had a cappuccino, a first for her. She's a tea person. She took this picture of me as I sipped my black Columbian brew.


After that we played it by ear, settling in to a delicious seafood lunch. 



While the boys (well just Osamu) napped I took a walk. Gotta get my steps. I was sleepy, though. I was up late last night catching up on work and even this morning I was wrapping up loose ends and sending emails and reports. I love listening to podcasts while I walk but today was one of those days where the podcast of my own thoughts was more than enough. 


Eri casually mentioned that the car is filthy, which is accurate. Kenzo was as great a helper as he's ever been helping me wash the car inside and out. I told him he could make ten yen for doing a good job (his usual rate), and he went above and beyond. He scrubbed the tires and vacuumed the floors and used the hose to rinse everything down, and since he stuck with me until the end even though it was a long and tiring task I gave him a ten yen bonus. He got 20 yen.

He scurried up to my office to get paid and immediately set about his accounting. 


Recently he used a good amount of his money, about 500 yen, to purchase a police gun and handcuff set, which I must say was a good get. The suction cup bullets really stick. So he's learning about cash flow. He's got his own wallet (my old one) and adds up his coin amounts on the back of a piece of origami paper. I gave him a little assist with the math since he's six. Turns out he has 280 yen, all of which was earned. He's got a bank account with the free money from relatives and whatnot, but his walking around money is completely the result of his hard work.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 d...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more