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Very White Very Quickly

My favorite time of the day is reading stories for Kenzo and Osamu before bed time. Even when I'm exhausted from everything, especially the crazy evenings with Eri gone at her web design class, story time is when I can sit down with the boys and attempt to carry us all away into some fanciful other place to experience an existence a little different than ours for the sole purpose of enjoyment.

For the last three evenings there has been no story time, however. A record. Eri read the boys a Japanese storybook one night, but papa has been sitting out. The reason is because story time before bed is a privilege, not a right. There has been some pervasive bad behavior in the evenings that has led to some draconian measures, like no bedtime stories.

I get it, of course. The boys get excited and hyperactive and it causes them to sometimes get hyper emotional as well. Kenzo is especially susceptible to saying things in the heat of his six-year-old emotional roller coaster. For example, "Papa is mean." 

I know that taking what a child says personally is not good, and I do okay at it, but I have to let the boys know that when they say hurtful things there are going to be consequences. Papa is not mean. I just want to get us all in the bath and have fun.

So story time becomes a linchpin. If everything from cleaning up toys to not fighting to listening to papa is obeyed, then we can proceed with a fun evening. If the boys get out of control and make each other cry or don't follow papa's instructions to clean up and get ready for the bath then certain privileges get revoked, and the one that hurts us all is story time. The boys love story time. For me it's the highlight of my day. The boys know that taking that away because of bad behavior hurts all of us.

After a bunch of heart to heart father son talks and some resetting of expectations, as well as some extra patience on my part, tonight was a return to our nightly tradition of reading before bedtime. It was getting late, though. Almost nine. The boys were yawning. I grabbed Kenzo's kindergarten English book and read a story from there and even sang a song. Osamu clutched his blanket the entire time.

Now I have to figure out how to replicate that and do it again tomorrow.

Today the first snow to stick fell. It snowed all afternoon and into the evening. The boys kept looking out the window and giving me reports on how white it was getting. Apparently it was getting very white very quickly

I took this video in the early afternoon when I first noticed the snow had started. And yes that's my stomach growling. I forgot to eat lunch.



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