Mothers’ Day

Mothers’ Day in Japan was yesterday. Ideally, Mayuki would have got Yuriko a card, cooked her breakfast in bed, and generally been helpful. Alas, she’s still a bit too young to manage that. She did give Yuriko a card, but, if I’m honest, she had a little bit of help with sorting that out. Next year she should at least be able to scribble inside with a crayon for herself…

Breakfast in bed isn’t really practical with an eight-month-old baby in the house, but we did set the day aside to do things that Yuriko wanted to do. The afternoon was thus spent looking around homes for sale. Most of these were ones that are actually realistic candidates for us to move into, although the £220,000 house we looked in at the end wasn’t. We aren’t planning to move in the immediate future, but we will need to move before Mayuki gets too big. Although it’s very common in Japan for young children to share their parents’ room and bed, that’s going to get impractical at some point in the next decade… (In Japanese, it’s called “sleeping like the river character”, because the kanji for “river” is 川; a slightly shorter line between two longer ones. The house we went to see at the end had signs in each room saying what they could be for, and one was “a big bedroom good for a family to sleep like a river”.)

One thing that looking around confirmed is that this is a very nice area. We looked at a couple of flats in an older development, from around early 1970s, and the rooms were large, and cheap, because the buildings are old. The first one we saw was, apparently, almost exactly the same as the flat in which Yuriko grew up. The floor squeaked just the same as in the house where I grew up, as well. There was also a lot of greenery around, which appealed to Yuriko. I’m a little unsure about old buildings in Japan, but given our budget and requirements we’re going to have to compromise on something, so an old building is quite a likely end result.

Mayuki was very good while we were looking around places, although I think she may have got a bit bored. She did fall asleep for a while at one point, but by the end she was complaining a bit.

In the evening, we went out for sushi, because we hadn’t done that for ages and Yuriko really wanted to. The local sushi shop had a fire a couple of months back, and is still closed, so we had to go to one a bit further away, although still within walking distance. It seems to be quite popular; we had to wait for an hour before we could sit down. Fortunately, we were sitting at a table in a corner, so Mayuki’s baby buggy didn’t get in anyone’s way, and we could pass her between us as we ate. Mayuki was not very quiet while we were eating, but part of that was because she was getting sleepy by the end; she did, in fact, fall asleep on us, and slept all the way home.

Mayuki has completely recovered from her illness now, with no apparent after effects, and she is keeping up a running commentary on me as I write this blog; “adahadahbuwaabaaa”. I’m not quite sure what this means she thinks of it, though. She’s definitely starting to complain now, though, so I’d better leave it here.