On the one hand, I like Ewan a whole lot just as he is now, tiny enough to fit into my arms while making cooing noises and giving big gummy smiles.* On the other hand, I cannot wait for his first birthday so I have an excuse to make this:



* Last week one of the moms commented on how focused he was on my face/eyes. As much as I would like to attribute this to our Totally Amazing Special Bond, I think he was just fascinated by the glare reflecting off of my glasses. Ooh, shiny!

I accidentally opened a junk mail this morning instead of deleting it. Now I'm tempted to download the rest of the message, just to see what the heck all this is about:

(subject) Now you will not get out of your bed for

(message) Use that internet address to visit our store

i made this one for a gift, but i've already cast on another for moi. simple is always prettiest to me. and you eat with your sunglasses on

i mean, look at her hair. i love that she's an expert knitter and yet chooses

Chooses what? What won't I get out of bed for? Why am I eating with my sunglasses on? What on earth are they selling?

Yes, he really does have shiny anime eyes.

One and a half weeks to go! And no, I'm nowhere near ready. I mean hello, have you met me? I'm planning to send my suitcase to the airport on the 4th, which is a bit early, but I'm busy on the 5th (all day BBQ, oh, the horror), and I feel that putting it off to the 6th would be pushing it, so I have to get all my shopping and packing done in just over a week. Not to mention the cleaning and the organizing of my lessons for the entire month of April and the six million other things I need to do. Whee!

A month off sure doesn't feel as long now that I've got it parceled out into weekish long intervals. Mind you, I'm not only travelling halfway across the world, I'm then also travelling halfway across Canada (which works out to pretty much the same thing, actually. Thanks to transfers, it'll take me longer to fly from PG to Ottawa than it will to fly from Tokyo to Vancouver.) I managed to book two out of three domestic flights on WestJet instead of Air Canada, and the AC one is a direct flight, so I'm hoping there will be no horrible luggage mishaps. Regardless, I shall be packing a fairly comprehensive carry-on bag. Lesson learned.

Spring and winter seem to be battling it out this week. Today winter was making a comeback, all icy winds and winter coats, but the cherry blossoms are due out this weekend. Sadly, I don't think I will get the chance to ohanami this year, but I still get to enjoy watching the whole country turn pink.

Ewan is becoming more interactive and Liam seems to be slowly growing resigned to the fact that he's here to stay. He's still very good at ignoring the baby's existence, though. He is also working on being very cheeky...we were reading a book about opposites and he kept asking me to buy him the various things shown in the book. His mother was properly horrified, but I was more amused that he seemed to think it was a catalogue and not just a book.

Green tea & oreo McFlurry.

This is Takahiro, also known as "the cute baby I hung out with over New Years", enjoying his new collection of Eric Carle books picked out by yours truly. Yes, I'm THAT aunt, the one who gives books instead of toys.

My new camera has lots of fancy settings, one of which is "aquarium", which I am interpreting to mean "takes pictures through glass pretty darn well!" If you thought you heard the distant schoolgirl cry of "kawaii!" at some point in the middle of the night, it's because this sleeping guy suddenly flipped around, looked us all straight in the face, still covering his own with his paws, then flipped back again. CUTEST THING EVER. Almost as cute was the fact that Liam was totally disinterested in the otter and way, way more awed by the basketball floating in the tank. "Look, Alisa! The basketball is swimming!"



Penguins!





At the petting zoo. Bunnies and pigs, hurray!





I don't remember what this guy is called, but how awesome is he?



The Train.

Y'know what? Getting up at 7 a.m. makes for a really long day. But I have survived another zoo trip and am now at home in my jammies (it's nearly 7 p.m.), looking forward to soup and wine and an early bedtime.

We had a really good group of kids this year. It was a small group, only 17, and all but one were girls aged 8-10, so they were pretty good at holding hands and staying with the group and generally not needing a lot of supervision. I was put on Liam Duty, since Masami ended up taking care of the one boy who came (poor little guy. Not only was he the only boy, he was the youngest, and he didn't know any of the other students. Once we got to the zoo, he burst into tears and told me he wanted to go home. At that point, I called in the big guns, aka Masami and her Japanese language ability to go "there there, it'll be fun, you just stick with me!")

I spent most of my time chasing after Liam and lifting him up so he could see over the fences and, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure doing that for six hours counts as a very good workout. There was only one problem, when we discovered that the zoo had, for some bizarre reason, plopped a black steam locomotive near the bear enclosure. I literally had to drag him away from it kicking and screaming ("No, sweetheart, we can't spend the rest of the afternoon hanging out by the train, the other kids wouldn't like it, and there are still lots of animals to see!"), and when Masami gave him a candy to make up for it, he promptly lost it down a grate. Poor little man had a bad few minutes of it there.

As always, the petting zoo portion was the most popular bit and, as always, the poor elephant depressed the hell out of me. An elephant in a pen barely bigger than my apartment? Not pretty. We also watched the dinosaur movie as tradition demands, and lo, it was boring. When your movie is called "Dinosaurs Alive!" and the poster features a T-Rex, I want rather more CGI dinosaurs and a lot less shots of archeologists delicately brushing dirt away from bones. I was a bit worried that the movie would be too scary for Liam, since it is on a giant screen and very loud, but he was fine. He sat there with a look on his face that I couldn't quite decipher...was he utterly enthralled, or so terrified he couldn't move? But then he fell asleep, so I'm not sure it was either. Before that, he spent his time asking me many questions about what was going on.

"What's that?"

"It's a dinosaur."

"What's it doing??"

"It's eating leaves."

"What's that?"

"It's a dinosaur skeleton."

"What's it doing??"

"It's...being dead?"

Now I'm feeling the effects of all that fresh air and exercise and will be very surprised if I manage to stay awake until midnight.

I've been meaning to bring up the utterly ridiculous stimulus plan the Japanese Prime Minister has come up with, but this guy did it better.

I suppose if you're a family, it's not quite as pointless. Andrew's family will be getting 64 000 yen, which is enough to actually buy something. For most single people, though, 12 000 yen is not really much. It wouldn't even cover the cost of a return shinkansen ticket to Tokyo. Technically I'm eligible (there was a big, big fuss over the original version, which said only Japanese citizens were eligible), but I think the actual process of getting the cash is convoluted and time-consuming, so I'm not sure if I'll attempt to claim it.

One of the most awesome things about teaching at both kindergartens is how I am hailed as a rockstar every single week. Children I don't even teach run up to me and give me hugs and tell me all about the exciting things that are happening in their lives.

The downside, of course, is that I spend a couple of years (2-4, depending on which kindy we are talking about) painstakingly teaching a group of kids, and then just as they hit six years old and finally have a large enough vocabulary base (not to mention the ability to actually follow directions) to play games and start learning something more complex than the colours, they leave. And I have to start all over again. Granted, the new kids are generally adorable and chubby cheeked and star struck all over again, but oy.

Today was my last day at the Monday kindy (until May, baby! At which point it will become the Wednesday kindy instead) and at the end of playtime, the kids presented me with a lovely drawing of myself (as per last year's version, I don't have a nose), and then the teacher had them pair up and link hands and form a human tunnel not unlike this one:



Except that in this particular case, none of the participants except myself were over four feet tall, so the tunnel was a wee bit cramped as I squat-walked my way through it.

I have absolutely no idea why, but I have been allergy-free for four days now. Four glorious, non-sneezy, non-itchy, non-medicated days. I'm simultaneously reveling in it and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Mr. Matsui and I were able to agree on a time to meet up and had dinner tonight. He told me his father died last September at the age of 99 years and 9 months. Specifically, he died on Sept. 9th at 9 am. My reaction went "Oh, I'm sorry, wow that's a long life, ok, that last bit is just weird." I will not be in Japan to meet up with his exchange student this year, which is probably just as well, since the last time I saw this particular twelfth grader he was a toddler, and that would just make me feel old.

All week long I have been completely unable to keep track of the days. It started on Monday when my alarm woke up me up and I stared blankly at it for a while, trying to remember if I actually had to get up or not. I eventually had to mentally go over what I'd done the day before to convince myself that it was, indeed, Monday. Tonight I went out for dinner with Andrew and his class, which is not a normal weekday activity for me, so my brain keeps trying to convince me it is Friday night.

A few days ago Mr. Matsui emailed me to tell me that he and his wife would be in town this weekend, and would I like to meet them for tea on Sunday? Sure, that sounds great! When? Well, they are attending a lecture, so either before or after that...unless I want to come to the lecture, too? What is it about? Well, it's an hour and a half, conducted entirely in Japanese, and is on the topic of senior living.

Yeah, I don't know what was going on there, either. Needless to say, I politely declined and suggested we meet after the lecture, as per his original suggestion. The next email I got said "how about we pick you up at 5:30 on Monday night?" At first I thought he'd made a typo, but no.

I work until 7:30 and am generally at work until nearly 8 on Mondays, so clearly that is not going to work. At this point I have no idea what our final plans will be, but I would not be entirely surprised to find out they'd morphed into having breakfast on Canada Day or something.

Ewan actually woke up the other day. He slept for over an hour, including through being fed (I do not think Liam ever had that problem), and finally woke up for a bit. AND I got to hold him for the first time. For about 2.5 seconds, but I had to take advantage of the opportunity, because Liam wasn't around, and I really don't think he'd appreciate seeing me pay attention to his brother. Then two of our young students demanded that they get to hold him too, and I will admit it was really cute to see the chubby eight year old cuddling the baby. She was so excited! Then it was her sister's turn, but he started fussing, and she panicked and thrust him at her mother, whose reaction was an amused "Yeah. Babies will do that."

There is serious talk of opening a second school. So far actual concrete action is limited to looking for rental space and offloading all of Andrew's Tuesday classes onto my schedule come April, but things are definitely afoot. I won't be involved in the second school (to be named MI 2. Apparently this idea sounded a lot better nine years ago, before Tom Cruise went crazy and the movies started sucking.), but if all goes to plan, I will end up being the main, if not only, teacher at our current location. It would mean working more hours, but contrary to popular belief, I actually have no objection to working more than 15 hours a week.

Thank goodness February is over. I didn't always dislike it, even though it is a generally unpopular month, but now I hate it. It combines freezing temperatures with hayfever, and that is just not good. I mean, I know I'll be the Tissue Queen for a few more months yet, but at least March has the decency to offer cherry blossoms.

Masami is starting to ease back into work. April is a big turnover time for us, so there's quite a bit of paperwork to be done, and we've had some trial students as well, so she's been coming in for an hour or so and bringing both the boys. I haven't had a chance to cuddle Ewan yet, what with work and Liam busily distracting me ("Baby? What baby? Oh, that baby. Sure, he's nice enough, but you don't want to play with HIM. He's boring. I'm way more fun! Watch me prove how much fun I am! Now give me a hug!"), but I will say I am impressed with the wee man's napping prowess. Today he slept through a noisy class, adults talking over the noisy class, the tv, his brother and another little boy making car noises, various students stopping to stroke his face/hands/head and one mother actually picking him up. That is some serious commitment to sleep.

I have five weeks left to get everything in order! I have to finish cleaning the apartment (Cleaning Tuesdays are coming along nicely, although hayfever attacks do tend to curtail the amount of quality cleaning time I can put in), actually organize it so that Miguel will not spend the full month tripping over all my things (he might appreciate some closet space, among other things), set up the kindergarten for the full month of April, pack, and, oh yes, finish organizing my trip. I should also draw up a little map of the area and write down instructions for all the appliances in the apartment. I have the sneaking suspicion that this month is going to fly by and there will be massive panicking on my part during the final week.

I leave you with this cake, which I made this weekend and highly recommend. Nom.