Skip to main content

Thank You M'Lady

After teeth brushing time every night the boys line up to get a drink of water before heading upstairs to their room for story time and lights out. Tonight I was pouring water into the freshly washed pink communal water cup and Kenzo puts his hands out, takes the cup, and says, "Thank you m'lady."

I'm beyond trying to figure out where he gets this stuff.

Then Osamu, ever the little brother, gets his turn for water. He takes the cup and says, "Thank you poor lady." 

Usually Kenzo gets annoyed at Osamu's attempts to copy him, but this one made him laugh pretty hard.

Today Osamu had his second kindergarten open house day, so Eri rode the bus with the boys. 


Tomorrow is Kenzo's big day so mama gets to ride the bus two days in a row. Back in the spring I went to open house and Osamu cried in my lap the entire time while all the kids in his class read stories, sang songs, and generally listened to poor Rinka-sensei as she did her best to get through the morning with 30 parents sitting there judging her. 

Apparently Osamu did a good job this time around.


It's been almost two years since I started working from home. I really didn't take to it very well at the beginning. It's weird because I am pretty adaptable to most things, but adapting to being in my house was a bridge too far.

One of the things that was a sudden and uncomfortable change was lunch. At the company I always got the lunch boxes they ordered. It was a cheap, mostly tasty, reliable meal. At home it became a crap shoot. I was so uncomfortable and nervous about working from home that there were many days I didn't eat lunch. I had so much anxiety about so many things that I either forgot to stop and eat or I just didn't have any appetite.

Luckily I got used to it, and these days, even though the anxiety is still a problem, I enjoy lunch time. Sometimes when Eri is here she makes me something. Yesterday she whipped up a delicious yakisoba lunch, which I ate at my desk so I could keep my work momentum going. I need to stop doing that and eat lunch with her at the dining table, especially since I'm having neurotic anxiety about my mortality. Maybe I'll write about that next time. 


Today was one of those days where I tapped into my salty guilty pleasure of instant ramen and steamed pork buns with hot mustard. Instant ramen has come a long way since Top Ramen. Today's miso ramen was a spicy treat. And I found the steamed pork bun when I was foraging in the freezer like a racoon. There's a whole bag of 'em. If you come over I'll nuke one for ya.

Comments

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...

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...

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...