田中家の朝 (Morning at the Tanaka House)

 "田中" (Tanaka), the name of the owner of this house we live in, is etched in stone above the mail slot at the top of the steps.  I often wonder what Tanaka-san is up to at 5AM when his house becomes a hive of Tofu-bunny activity.

 Maggie likes to come downstairs and greet her baby brother Arthur FIRST THING.

 Her bottle is a close second, though.  Maggie has also discovered Mommy's little helper.  Lately she uses it to step up and remove all of the CD's from the CD rack.  Good thing we don't bother keeping them in any particular order.

Maggie has a few cartoons she likes to watch in the morning.  They are about as wholesome as it gets.  Her favorite character in the series is Sophia.  She likes to watch the Sophia episodes over and over again.  Good thing they are only a couple of minutes long each!  Sometimes I think the only reason she lets me do her hair is so that it can be in pigtails just like Sophia.  Here's Maggie readying her bag, just like Sophia.  You can click here to see the series online.  You can select your language in the upper right corner.  We watch them in French, of course! 

Maggie discovered the whale on the back of this magazine.  She is thrilled by sea creatures.  The points to it, looks up at me, and tries to imitate "baleine" (whale, in French).  Do my best not to giggle when she says "Blahblah" back at me very emphatically.  She also tries to say Arthur, Nemo (whom we watch some evening, albeit in Spanish), and "biberon" (bottle, in French).

Arthur likes to look out of the sliding glass doors onto the scene in the backyard or look up at me from his Boppy and coo adorably.

 Sunday mornings there is a lot of activity in the kitchen because that's when Daddy makes us pancakes.  Pancakes are quite an evolution.  Thank goodness Maggie is on the scene to help out.

We also have to decide what we are going to wear in the morning.  Maggie has quite the flair for picking out her outfits.  And she loves to accessorize.  Here she is in an increasingly unseasonable ensemble of her choosing.

I wish I could have gotten her to wear those a couple of months ago.  And this is what happens when Daddy picks out our outfit...

 We just love that Daddy!  Maggie just loves to select her own shoes, too.  Here she is pairing boots with a maxi... Move over Miley Cyrus!

Once Arthur is satisfied with the scene outside, he likes to sit up in someone's lap and survey the scene in the living room.

These days, it doesn't take very long before Maggie is done with the Tanaka House for the morning and ready to move on.  Here she is at 7AM trying to open the sliding glass door.  Good thing she hasn't figured out the locking mechanism on this one!

 And here it is, 7:15AM and we are on our way out the gate.  No outfit would be complete without an appropriate handbag.  Maggie has carefully selected hers from the offerings of our yard, evicted whatever arthropods were nesting in it, and carries on as if Coco Chanel had bequeathed it to her.  You go girl!

 Uh oh! Don't forget to shut that gate!

 Let's go!  On y va! Vamos! 行きましょね！

 Since nursery school isn't open until 8AM, we went to the playground.  One day you will be able to Click here to see some footage of the cutest thing ever to happen to a playground, but I'm having trouble with my movie editor, so I'll have to update the post or put it in another post.  I wish I could take more pictures on the playground, but my little mountain goat often requires both of my hands to keep her safe as she climbs to such great heights... And here we are on the yellow brick road to nursery school.

What could be cuter?  Two of them, I guess!

Maggie's Day

Clearly, I filled in the left hand side of the note.  The right hand side was written by Maggie's teacher named Okutsuki (?) Mariko (her first name) and begins with Maggie's body temperature (under her armpit).  They did not leave the nursery school room today.  She pooped 0 times and was happy.  She napped from 12:35 to 15:00.  At 09:30 she had a snack of baby biscuit and barley tea (mugicha). She ate nearly all of her lunch (pictured below), which consisted of rice, Japanese meatballs, macaroni salad, boiled sausage, and a choco-marshmallow.  At 15:30, she had a vegetable snack and more mugicha.  Her note reads:  "Today because it was raining, we stayed in the room and played with clay.  Maggie-chan made balls out of the clay, heap them up and then stab (?) them.  It looked like she was making dango*! Afterwards, with her favorite baby toys she played in very good spirits.  Recently, Maggie has gotten good at sitting in her seat and waiting!"

*Japanese round hollow doughnuts made with something glutinous, usually covered in sesame seeds and often filled with adzuki bean paste) 

Jealous!

Her lunch had 385 calories, 10.6 grams of protein, 8.8 grams of fat, and 900milligrams of sodium or salt.  Look, a marshmallow in the shape of the Shinkansen (bullet train)!

Growing, growing!

This is just a short post for all those who keep asking... Maggie, at 18.5 months, is just over 80cm and 11kg. (You can have Siri convert that to English units if you have an iPhone.) she mostly wears 18 month clothing with a few 12 month things she just won't let go of and the occasional 24 month article. Her feet are 13cm by Japanese measurement. They are also growing quickly.  I found a few summer sandals in14, but she was in a funk that day and refused everything I showed her, so we couldn't try them on.

Arthur, at 2.5 months is definitely out of newborn and even some 0 to 3 month stuff.  He fits 3 month stuff pretty well, but will soon be moving into 3 to 6 month and beyond.  I think he's pushing 60cm and 6kg.  No idea what size his feet are.  We're still working on sitting up here.

I can feel everyone rolling their eyes at the metric, but you're just going to have to google it or ask Siri, because I am embracing it.

It's getting hot here. Where we are going this summer, Singapore and Taiwan (and hopefully back to the States for a spell), it is likely to be even hotter!

It's about 5:30AM and Maggie's all ready to play outside

We were all up by 5AM... **yawn** Yay.

This guy got up around 4:45 this morning!

Went to Tokyo to get a SOFA stamp in his passport at the Embassy.  Now we can get him a visa so we can leave the country and re-enter as necessary!  Here we are riding the Romancecar, a special Odakyu Line train that goes from Shinjuku (Tokyo) to Machida (a few stops up the line from us).

May Days

If you just want to see pictures, you can scroll past the print.  They are all at the end.

Sorry, Maggie and Arthur!  I have been delinquent in keeping up with all the cuteness running rampant around here.  Your Papa left last Friday on deployment, and in addition to missing him, I have been doing lots of things to get ready for us to vacate this place for the summer.  For one thing, Arthur needs some stamps in his passport that we just got so he can come back into the country after we leave.  These will require a trip to the embassy in Tokyo and a trip on base.  For another, Buttercup needs a home while we are gone.  This search has already incurred multiple trips to the base with an unhappy kitty and all of her kitty belongings. Mew!

Excuses, excuses.  Let's get down to business.

Maggie Meyers!  Where to begin... You are quite the early-to-bed-early-to-rise little bunny.  A stickler for your 7 o'clock bedtime, you buried your head in a sofa pillow and brought me my flip-flops when we tarried at the neighbors just past 7:15.  Even though you were having the time of your little life!  You just can't wait to get in your crib with one binky in your mouth and one in hand.  I guess it's a good thing, because we can hardly count on your sleeping past 5:15AM no matter when you go to bed.  When you wake up, you are so happy to see whomever it is that rescues you from your crib.

When we get downstairs in the morning, you love to greet your little brother Arthur.  An attentive big sister, you rush to his side as soon as he starts crying, offering him any comfort you can: your binky, your bottle, perhaps a cherry tomato you found on the floor, bouncing and rocking him (rather vigorously at times).

You can hardly be kept at the Tanaka House past 8AM.  Once you have exhausted the playing possibilities inside the house, you move onto the yard, and eventually you grab your favorite sandbox toys and head for the gate.  You are the most adorable thing to ever happen to a playground. It used to be that you only liked to climb the ladder and attempt to go up the wrong way, but all of the sudden you have discovered the thrill of a good slide and can't seem to get enough of it, even though some of the slides around here like to give your mommy a heart attack.  They are sooo tall.  I do what I can to keep both hands on you until you are safely seated and on your way down.

You have been mimicking the sounds around you for a few months now: crows, airplanes, puppies and kitties, sometimes people, too.  Just these last few days, though, you have actually been attempting to repeat words and names: whale, Arthur, Mama, and Nemo.  You are also getting better at making signs.  "More" and "Bottle" and "Flower" and "Fish" are a few of your favorites.  You have understood many words and phrases and signs for a long time, but it is new and fun to see how you initiate them yourself!

Oh and you are sitting on the potty now and insist exclusively on pull-up diapers.  All we've ever gotten out of you on the potty is a fart, though.  Baby steps...

Arthur Christopher Meyers!  At two and a half months, you still wake me up a couple of times a night, but aside from nursing at 11PM and 2AM, you sleep pretty consistently between the hours of 7:30PM and 4:30AM.  When you are awake, you love to look up into my face and smile and coo.  You are discovering your limbs and have a pretty tight grip.  You don't hate tummy time as much as Maggie did, but it is clearly not your favorite.  You take some pretty good naps both swaddled in the criblet, as well as in Mommy's new BECO Gemini, which is sooo much easier on my shoulders than the Bjorn.  Especially since you've been known to push a three-hour nap strapped to me.  All of the sudden your eye isn't gummy anymore.  Yay!!!

That's all for now.  It is definitely bedtime for a Tofu-Mommy!

Daddy's last donuts before deployment

Daddy, in his helicopter in Okinawa

Clearly, Maggie enjoys chocolate mousse... even if it's vegan!

Tearing it up at the playground!

Can we go yet?  It's already 8AM.

Rub-a-dub-dub!

Good morning America!  How are you?

Could I be any cuter?

Maggie, asserting herself as the original occupant of the pink buzzy seat.

Coo!

Passed out at a restaurant in Oyama

Thanks for my Japanese Fishies, Miss Linda!

Seaweed for breakfast... yum!

Look who's got the remotes!

Tearing it up at the Tanaka House

Milk coma

Mew!  In search of a nice place to summer...

Eyeroll, please!

One day Maggie and Arthur are going to roll their eyes at us.  Nonstop.  As parents, Matt and I have lots of glaring eye-rollable qualities.  Consider first of all how I spend much of my day: in the kitchen.  What could I possibly doing in the kitchen all day?  Oh making things like vegan yogurt and cream cheese to replace non-vegan things in recipes that aren't vegan to start with.  Are we vegan? Not anymore.  Morning sickness and another incident put an end to that.  We are still quasi-vegan, I suppose.  I made vegan cream cheese the other day to pair with home-cured salmon.  Yes, vegan cream cheese with ACTUAL salmon...  Eyeroll, please.  It was quite the process, having to hang for 24 hours in a cheese cloth suspended over our sink.  Is there milk in our fridge?  Yes, right next to the two kinds of soymilk and sometimes almond milk. Milk is the only thing we can regularly get around here that's not highly processed and doesn't curdle in hot coffee.  Still, I insisted on making vegan cream cheese rather than buying the easily available dairy variety.

I burn things all the time in my kitchen.  Walnuts.  Caraway seeds.  Toast.  We had a toaster but it started working less and less because of electrical differences between here (Japan) and America where the toaster was originally purchased and used.  I could use a timer, but I don't have a dedicated one.  I have Siri set a timer for me quite a lot.  Siri is often in the next room, though, or my hands are so full of food prep that I can't bring myself to hold down the Siri-call button on my $500-iPhone.  Also, she can only do one timer at a time.  We've looked for timers on many occasions.  There are lots of them, but they are all made in China and we have agreed not to buy things made in China that we are not planning to walk on or if it's not an absolute crisis, because they don't last, you might read in the paper one day that it is toxic, and labor practices in China are questionable at best.  Do we own things made in China?  Yes.  Have I visited China and plan to visit there again, like maybe this summer?  Yes.  Isn't it frustrating to always be burning things?  Yes... Eyeroll, please.

I am American, born and raised.  So is Matt.  I speak to my kids in French, and Matt speaks to them in Spanish.  We live in Japan.  Did either of us grow up speaking these languages with anyone?  No... Eyeroll, please.

One day when we are done having babies and moving around with the Navy, we are going to get rid of a lot of our furniture and put the rest in storage and take the fam on a long trip... to Disney? Nope.  Europe?  Nope.  China?  African Safari?  Cruise?  Nope.  We are going to hike part of the Appalachian trail.  With backpacks.  And kids.  They'll appreciate the experience one day... Eyeroll, please.

I could go on, but this blog is about Maggie and Arthur and their childhood, not about what crazy parents they have.  But that's part of it, too, I suppose.  Here are some pictures:

Arthur, at 4:45AM.  But he didn't want to sleep anymore.  So he chatted with Mom over coffee.

It sure is bright out at 5AM here in Japan, thanks to no daylight savings.

Maggie singing along with Caleb and Sophia on the computer, sporting pigtails (just like Sophia) and new hair clips from the 100yen store.

Aren't these hairclips great?

Daddy's getting ready to jog Maggie to nursery school and go for a run!

Arthur and Daddy, just before Daddy goes off to fly his helicopter.

Oh, no.  Must be time for Mommy.