Tofu-bunny Barf-O-Rama

Don't let Maggie get too upset.  She'll barf everywhere.  Seriously, just like the scene in Pitch Perfect.  The last time this happened was when I tried to give her medicine against her will almost a year ago.  

Well, our friend Jack came to spend the night while his parents hiked Mt Fuji.  Jack and Maggie played so nicely together and were having so much fun.  Eventually, it was clear from both of their demeanors that bedtime had come.  Lots of yawning, lounging and rubbing of eyes.

I was thinking of putting Maggie in her crib in the same room with Jack in his pack 'n play.  Poor spoiled Maggie hasn't had to sleep by herself in an enclosure since before we went to Singapore (that's nearly 3 months ago), however and didn't take it very well.  She cried so hard she started coughing.  She coughed so hard she barfed.  She barfed everywhere, as if to ensure she would not be sleeping in her crib this particular evening.  I took her out of there, stripped her, stripped the bed, and separated the barfed-on animals from those spared such humiliation.  

Poorest Jack!  All of this was very upsetting.  As if he wasn't upset enough to be going to bed without his own Mommy to tuck him in.  

To make the situation all the easier, Arthur hadn't gone to sleep yet either.  I couldn't do all of this fast enough to get Maggie in the bathroom before she made it to the tatami mat room (和室) we have been sleeping in as a family while Matt is away. I found her a few minutes later laid out in the bed, her vomit-crusted ear on the pillow.  Oy.

After bathing Maggie and wrangling her and Arthur to bed, I started the load of unbarfed-on laundry that was already waiting.  I went back upstairs armed with wipes and a flashlight and wiped up the splatters of barf on and around the stripped crib, doing my best not to disturb now-sleeping Jack.  From the diaper-changing table, Buttercup watched peacefully with her best air of tofu-kitty nonchalance as I went through wipe after wipe on the corner of the rug and snipped off chunks of barf-laden tuile from the bedskirt.  

I had to run the barfed-on load twice and will have to run a couple of items a third time. Really glad I fed Maggie raspberries and rice and broccoli.  I was going to try a new smoothie after the kids went to bed, but settled for a bowl of cereal instead.  I really had no desire to see anything blended after that episode!

Anyone want to babysit Maggie?  Whoa, don't speak all at once.  Everyone can have a shot at tofu-bunny barf-o-rama!

**update** I drafted this post at the end of August.  Since then, Papa has returned.  This morning, when he had to go to work, Maggie let the whole neighborhood know how opposed she was to this.  It was quite the scene at nearly 6am, and while it didn't end up a barf-o-rama, she did spit up part of her bottle between sobs.  Glad we were outside this time!

If only I had known we were going to see this dinner again later...

Gentleman Jack, he's so gentle with both Buttercup and Arthur.

Not-quite-so-gentle Maggie

Getting sleepy...

Watching Peter Pan together in Matt's big comfy la-z-boy

Getting our shoes on in the morning

That's the 8 o'clock bell... time to head to school!

How to Potty Train a Tofu-bunny?

So this month Maggie got a potty.  It's a little red one, very simple, from Ikea.  Says it was made in Latvia!  So far, she's pooped on it twice and peed a number of times.  At the good suggestion of a friend, she has been receiving little rewards every time she uses it successfully.  I have a grab bag with small trinkets (mostly little Japanese animal- and Hello Kitty-shaped erasers and a few other things), but some how a bag of animal crackers ended up in my cart last time I went to the commissary, so these have been used to reward Maggie, as well.  Plus, she's not always so good at just taking one thing out of the grab bag... A tofubunny can fit more than you think into that little chubby paw!

And how is it going?  The first day was STELLAR!  She used it twice, once to pee and once to poop with very little prompting from me.   Then she picked it up and brought it to the big toilet, dumped it, put a wad of toilet paper in (just like Mommy!  Well, almost.  She failed to wipe herself with it first. Also, she likes to put the potty paper ALL the way in the potty rather than just dropping it in and trusting that it will make it into the flushable part of the bowl... *sigh*) and flushed! She loves to flush.  She also loves to wash her hands, thank goodness!  

And the next day?  Oh, she changed her mind and wanted very little to do with the potty.  She decided the floor was a better place to relieve herself.  I had been encouraged to buy her cute little panties because of the day before, but all that did was create laundry.  I have had to be more proactive, putting her on the potty every ten minutes or so.  If that means she can't keep playing what she was playing with, I let her watch a video on my iPad or play a silly iPad game.  Maggie now loves PokoPang and Birzzle.  I hope she gets good at Birzzle, so we can download the cute stickers for free for our fun new messaging app called LINE... Anyone with a smartphone who loves to use emoticons (ahem, T-Bone) should download this app straight away and friend us!  Our user ID is mimispyce!  LINE makes it very easy to share multiple pictures and videos, and they have the cutest stickers!  (Like emoticons, but cuter, funnier and more expressive).  Back to the story...

The conclusion?  Well, after a couple weeks of several morning and evenings a week without a diaper, her diaper rash is a lot better.  She's still not potty trained fully, however, and hardly uses the potty without a lot of input from me.  It keeps me very busy.  We would probably have more success if I didn't have also to meet Arthur's needs and could focus my attention on helping Maggie to appreciate the potty and want to use the potty.  Right now it's all I can do to get her to sit on it and be regular about it every 10 minutes when we are at home.  I don't think a cuter potty with more whistles and bells would help.  If I were able to be more consistent and not stop the training every time we go somewhere or have guests stop by because I don't have a big enough attention span to deal with my charges here, the outside world, and the possibility of an accident, we might be more successful, too.  Perhaps a potty story in French and one of those pants-wetting dolls I've read about might help... Next time, I suppose.

Some friends living in Hawaii took their daughter to Maui and sent her to a lady's house for the day who potty trains kids, professionally.  She likes to have a group of them and she potty trains them all in one day... Oh wouldn't that be nice?  If anyone knows of such a service here in Japan, please, tell me!

In the mean time, less or no diaper rash is worth the trouble.

How long do I have to sit here?

August 5, 2013: POOPY IN THE POTTY!!! 

YAY!!! Hello Kitty eraser for our efforts!

Might as well be Disney

So how does a tofu-family entertain itself here in Japan? Jaunt off to Tokyo Disney on the weekend? Not exactly... Here's Maggie playing in the pedestrian walkway alongside our house with a laundry basket, a rock and a whole in the wall.

Then there's these "pick up after your pup" posters that she just loves! At the top of the walkway stairs is an empty park with some flowers, rocks, and a water fountain. Maggie could play here for an hour. Might as well be Disney.

It's Saturday morning, and Daddy says we're going to Tokyo.  We tried out a new hairdo... cute, but not very sturdy-looking.  We'll be redoing this one all day long... Ain't nobody got time fo'dat!

Better make sure all the dishes are done before we take off...

And the yard needs some weeding.  So much to do before we head off to Tokyo!

Before anybody gets on any train, though, we better make a Mister Donut stop.  It is Saturday after all.  This Saturday, our buddy Jack and his mommy joined us!

Maggie, getting her donut face on.

Maggie, showing Daddy how we do the donut dance.  Click here and you can see it, too... "Do-do-do-do-do-do-dooonuts!"

Finally made it to Tokyo Midtown.  We read about this kid-friendly venture from an article Matt clipped out from the Japan Times, the English language newspaper we subscribe to here at the Tanaka House.  This park uses lots of water in it's landscaping, and water is Maggie's favorite landscape feature!

Here she is playing peekaboo in the flowers...

Maggie pays attention to the signage...  At least enough attention to use the signage to play more peekaboo!

Coucou!

Oh boy, a bunny on a leash!  This is the second bunny on a leash we have encountered here in Japan. Click here if you want to see Maggie do the Tokyo Bunny Hop!

So what was Arthur up to all day?  Well, here he is checking out the scene at the Midtown complex...

And here's what he was looking at... Likes the bright lights, this one does.

But here's where he spent the majority of the outing...

Nothing to see here, folks!

Tuckered out on the train ride back home.

Maggie's dogs are barking...  Yours would, too, if you had to terrorize a town the size of Tokyo!

To daycare... or not to daycare?

I don't have work outside of my home, but one of my kids goes to a nursery school here in town.  That would be Maggie.  I was hardly ready to put her in any sort of daycare when the time came, but it was out of necessity.  Matt and I had to attend a class for 5 days, no kids allowed.  We went ahead and signed her up for the whole month, so I could unpack boxes in peace.  We had just moved to Japan.  She was nearing seven months old, and my milk was starting to go away.  Soon I found out I was pregnant again.  Of course, the first thing to happen was she got really sick the next week.  She's gotten sick several times since then, but at least it made me go ahead and figure out the doctor thing here.  She was only in it for part of June, all of July, and a few days in August, because we went back to the  States for a wedding and then Matt had a school. We got back to Japan around Thanksgiving and decided to put her in again starting in December.  At this point, she was scooting and sometimes walking around and playing, so I felt a little less guilty about it.

In the end, it turns out that nursery school here in Japan is a good thing for Maggie and for our family.  First of all, it forces us to deal in Japanese.  Do you see this journal that I have to fill out everyday before taking her in?  And when I get her back at the end of the day, I get the same in return, plus a cute report in Japanese to decipher, but our reward is that we get to hear about Maggie's day, even though she can't speak.

Maggie decided that today she wanted to ride in her chariot to go to daycare.  This is not our yard, by the way.  Matt only wishes it was.

Maggie runs right in and takes her shoes off just like a little Japanese kid!

At school, they feed them Bento Box lunches.  At home we keep Maggie on a similar diet of rice balls and seaweed, along with a healthy serving of fruit.

In addition to being exposed to Japanese language, culture and food, Maggie probably has a much better day at the nursery school than she would at home with Arthur and me.  Most of my day at home is spent preparing some sort of fun meal for dinner (which Maggie is welcome to eat but seldom wants), keeping up with laundry (among other things we have to hang clothes out to dry here, so it's an ordeal...), and maybe embarking on some other bigger picture project (that is, if Arthur will allow it).  At nursery school, the entire day is geared towards things Maggie wants to do, like play with blocks, go on walks, and run around like a crazy person with her tomodachis (friends).

I was in the hospital for five days after a normal unmedicated vaginal delivery of Arthur.  That's the standard stay after childbirth in Japan.  Visiting hours were from 3PM to 7PM.  Thus, he was basically an only-child for those 5 days, thanks to his grandmothers who were taking care of Maggie while I was in the hospital.  I had a tearful moment the morning I was scheduled to leave the hospital when I realized our homecoming meant the end of both Maggie and Arthur's only-childhoods.  Thanks to Maggie going to nursery school, Arthur gets a decent helping of the only-childhood Maggie had.

Maggie LOVES her new baby brother, so he needs lots of protection from her affection, which can be a little intense at times.  It's very exciting, though, to think of what good little buddies they will becomes as they grow up together!  Maybe one day, Maggie will hold his little hand on his first day of nursery school...

Day 2 of being a blogger

Am I really going to keep this up? I just have a feeling one day Maggie and Arthur are going to want to know what their childhood in Japan was like, and I might not be able to decipher the little daily notes from the nursery school anymore.

So why do we call them tofu-bunnies? I think the term originated with us here in Japan, but several years ago, when we were taking a Japanese class in Sapporo.  We had gone to the movies and  unfortunately, there was only one in English.  And it was a scary one.  Afterwards, I remarked that we need to go see something ridiculously cute with "tofu-bunnies" hopping around.  I guess I just envisioned some really cute Japanese cartoon character that would help me avoid nightmares.  Then somehow this term came to mean babies and small children.  They are all soft and squishy from the time they are born and usually for a few years thereafter.  And they are cute and sweet like little bunnies.

Today I took Arthur to the doctor to get his right eye checked out.  I took him back to the pediatrician at the same Japanese hospital where he was born and had his subsequent 4-week check up.  Since he was born, his right eye puts out a lot of gunk which dries and gums up his eyelid.  We have to periodically clean it with a damp cloth throughout the day.  After I filled out all the silly paperwork, one of the administrators asked me when I had last weighed him.  I guess she didn't believe me that he was 5 kilos.  I told her it was the 4-week check.  She indicated that I needed to weigh him again without his diaper.  Ugh.  He was peacefully asleep in the Bjorn.  But I woke him up, removed his sleeper, pulled out a clean diaper to have at the ready, and slipped him out of his dirty one onto the scale.  The read out said he weighed 5.5 kilos.  Before we could get him off the scale, he sprayed it and the adjacent administrative station down, if you know what I mean.  I did what I could to shield everyone with the clean diaper, but he definitely sprayed a printer or two.  Serves them right for putting the baby scale next to the office equipment.  Serves them right for waking him up and making him get naked in the middle of the waiting room.

This morning, Maggie made me take her for a ride in the snap n go.  She likes to ride around in the bottom of the carriage, as if she's in some sort of chariot.  She also insisted on wearing her daddy's Adidas slip ons that he puts on to run out and get the paper in the morning.  She undoes the velcro (or has me help her undo the velcro) as if they won't fit properly unless she velcros them over her miniscule paw, rather than just slipping it in.  Could anything be cuter?

We also have a tofu-kitty, by the way.  Her name is Buttercup.  As I am typing, she is curled up in her daddy's recliner, lightly snoring.

Here's Maggie, keeping calm and charioting on.

Do these shoes make her bum look big?

A tofu-kitty, looking pretty content.

Arthur, hanging out in the front yard.
And now he's getting a little crazy...

Now I'm a blogger

I am a mom of TWO (2) adorable tofu-bunnies who are growing so fast and doing so many things and have family and friends all over the world that want to know just what they are up to.  So here it is.  I am a blogger.

Maggie is 18 months, or will be on the 13th of May.  She is getting molars.  She goes to bed every night promptly at 7PM, but she varies as to when to start her day.  Lately, it's around 5:30AM.  She goes to a Japanese nursery school, which she loves.  When she's not at nursery school, she enjoys terrorizing her environs by pulling everything off of every shelf and out of every drawer or rearranging things to her liking.  She loves to put things in a bag or basket and then hook it over her arm to her elbow and march about like a lady.  She also likes to push carts, strollers, and anything else on four wheels.  She loves puppies and kitties, and her little brother Arthur.

Arthur was born in the middle of last month at a Japanese hospital, about a 15 minute walk from our house.  He is a love.  He just started smiling at me and getting really excited during his alert periods like he's getting ready to tell me something and just can't seem to gather his words.  Eventually, he sums it up with a big sweet "Hooo..."  I love him!  Matt could not be there for Arthur's birth, but both of his grandmothers came across the Pacific to be there for him and Maggie, and a wonderful doula named Amanda McFadden braved the Japanese hospital to attend to his birth.  We spent the standard 5 days in the hospital afterwards.  It has been quite an adventure!

Today was a day off of nursery school for Maggie.  It is Golden Week here in Japan and she may well have the whole week off.  We'll find out tomorrow!  This morning, after a jaunt to the playground and a snack, we headed for the Vinawalk in Ebina.  Maggie saw all the other kids playing in the "river" with the water spouts.  She wasn't brave enough at first, but eventually she mustered her courage to go down the rocky bank to the "river" and get all wet.  I wish I had a picture of this, but I didn't want to take my iPhone anywhere near there.  Arthur slept dutifully in the Bjorn while all this was going down.  After Ebina, we terrorized the children's floor of the Odakyu Department Store in Machida.  Got home around 5PM.  Everyone's in bed now.  Just waiting for Matt to get home from his flight.

Over and out.