Nothing But Words

It’s hard to believe that Eidan is 8 months olds already. His two front bottom teeth came in a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday he finally figured out crawling. He spent a few days in frustration, going backwards when he meant to go forwards, but now he has all his gears properly aligned and has achieved forward motion. When Kai learned to crawl, I frequently played a game with him where he would start crawling towards me from one side of the room, while I was on the other side, making a tower with a set of stacking cups. The goal was for him to reach me and knock it down before I finished. Eidan is now playing this game with me, and he laughs himself silly every time he knocks down the cups.

He’s at a stage where nothing makes him happier than spreading chaos and destruction. He used to play quietly and gently with his toys, but how he spends some of his playtime seeing how much noise he can make banging them together, or how far he can throw them. He’s still into roaring, as I mentioned before, and now he has also taken to growling. Sometimes I can hear him growling upstairs when I come home, and the standing joke is for me to ask if some feral animal has snuck into the house.

Having said all that, he’s also very sweet. He’ll give you a little hug and rest his head on your shoulder when he’s happy to see you.

We were worried about him over the past week, as he suddenly started refusing his baby food, and would only drink from his bottle. We kept trying to feed him several time every day, but at most we could get him to eat only a few bites. Last night we finally figured out the reason: he just doesn’t want to eat baby food anymore – he wants regular food. He had a big dinner last night, consisting of sliced bananas, yogurt, chicken noodle soup, and eggplant. He was so thrilled that we finally figured it out that he burst into gleeful laughter several times during the meal.

I think I forgot to mention previously that he had a good checkup last month. Although he was well below average for weight (20th percentile), he was at 80th percentile for height. Hmm, tall and thin… I wonder where that comes from?

As you might imagine, Maria and I are having many conversations about our trip next year.

1. The first big question is where Maria is going to work. As part of the fellowhsip, the Council on Foreign Relations will place her in an organization relevant to her research interests. It’s not finalized yet, but it looks likes she will go to JICA – the Japan International Cooperation Agency – where she will analyze options and make recommendations for how JICA makes its international aid loans in the future.
2. The second big question is finding an international school for Kai. These schools are intended for expat families like us, so instruction is in English and Japanese (it would be way too overwhelming to throw Kai into an all-Japanese school!). The problem is that they are extremely expensive, with tuitions around $15,000/year (the number is even scarier looking in Yen: 1,700,000). But through Maria’s friends in Japan, we’ve learned about a few that are less expensive, so we’re chasing down those leads. One is the Doremi Garden Preschool, which, at the very least, has an awfully cute website (and if Kai goes there, I’d probably be the only dad on “Mommy and Me” days!). We actually have to nail this down soon, as the classes at these schools fill up quickly.
3. Once we’ve settled on Kai’s school, that will determine the part of town we live in, as I’ll need to take Kai to school on the train each day, and we don’t want it to be a long commute. Maria says it can be difficult for foreigners to find a nice place, as apartments rented to foreigners are typically rented only to foreigners, which means they may not be in the best shape. So she has also asked her friends to help us find places that are normally rented to Japanese families.
4. Then there’s our house here. We’re going to talk with a good friend of Maria’s to see if she’d like to live there while we’re away, and see if she can cover about half the mortgage (we’ve decided we’re not comfortable with the risk of simply renting the house to people we don’t know). That would make it financially viable for me to drop to part-time status, or even go on leave for a while.

So I’m imagining a typical weekday in Japan for us will go something like this: Maria will work 9-5, and I’ll be in charge of the boys. Eidan and I will ride on the train with Kai to take him to school in the morning, then if the weather isn’t too bad I’ll bop around a different part of Tokyo each day with Eidan until it’s time to pick up Kai. Then I’ll work for a few hours at night (which is when my cowokers in the US will be starting their day, so we can be online at the same time). For Maria, our six months in Japan will be mostly about work, but for me, it’s mostly an extended family vacation. All I can say is, I married well

I haven’t posted any new videos of the boys in a while, so here’s four for you. The first one is Kai playing his Star Wars light sabre game – as you can see, he works up quite a sweat with this game (who says video games lead to slothfulness?). The second is Kai reciting the French alphabet. The third is Kai bopping Eidan on the head with a balloon, which Eidan thinks is just about the best thing in the world. And the fourth is Eidan in his doorway jumper, which is one of his favorite places to be.

Give the videos a minute or so to load in your browser, particularly the first once, since it’s a couple minutes long.

We took these about a month ago, before Eidan turned into a meatball.

Maria, Kai, and I had the flu this past week. Kai didn’t have it too badly, but I was flat on my back for three days before I started feeling better, and it was the same with Maria. Except she started a week earlier, got better, then relapsed…and then relapsed again. As a special bonus the last time around, she got these weird welts on her face, arms, legs, and throat. Maria thought they made her look like Ferdinand Marcos. Her doctor didn’t have any idea what was causing them, but put her on antiobiotics anyway. They seem to be working – the welts are shrinking and her skin is peeling, as if she had a sunburn. Freaky. Welcome to the wonderful world of 21st century viruses and infections.

Fortunately my mother-in-law is here, so she did her best to take care of everyone. Luckily she and Eidan didn’t get sick. She has taken it upon herself to fatten up Eidan as much as possible. She has an array of bottles and baby food laid out in front of her on the table at all times, angling for every opportunity to get as much food in him as he’ll tolerate. In the two weeks or so she’s been here, she’s transformed him into a big, rolly-poly meatball. He’s also taken to roaring. He likes it when you roar back, and then it becomes a game where you try to out-roar each other. This kid is all boy: in addition to roaring, he loves to play rough. The more you jostle him and wrestle with him, the more he smiles and laughs. And I do mean wrestle: he’ll grab at you and push you as best as a tiny person can. He’s not crawling yet, but he’s on the verge. He gets on his hands and knees and wiggles his butt while moving his arms – soon he’ll get all the different motions going in coordination, and he’ll be on his way. We’ve been warning Kai about this development: I’m certain that once Eidan can move on his own, he’ll want to follow Kai everywhere, and get into all Kai’s stuff.

I still have to finish posting the pictures I promised last week – look for them here soon!

Kai has been taking karate classes for about six months now. For a while it was the the sort of thing where we’d have to drag him to class, but then once he was there he’d have a great time. Then, about a month ago, they gave the kids shin guards and boxing gloves, and for some reason that put him over the edge: now when he comes back from class we can’t get him to take his ghi off, and he spends the rest of the day having mock karate duels with imaginary enemies (or me).

It’s very entertaining to watch him in class. He’s so enthusiastic he can’t do anything in a normal way. For example, when asked to come to attention, he doesn’t just slap his hands to his thighs and say “yes, sir”, he embellishes it by first leaping in the air as high as he can. Also, he asks a lot of questions, which I’m proud of. The other kids always just do what they’re told, or do their best to fake it if they don’t fully understand. But he’ll politely ask for help, or ask questions about why they’re doing a particular exercise. Part of that comes from his own assertiveness and curiosity, but I think Maria and I also deserve from credit. When we talk to him, we explain things in terms he can understand, but we try to never talk down to him, or just order him around “because I say so.” I notice a lot of parents try and fail to make their kids be polite to others, and its because they are often authoritarian with their kids and not very polite to them at all. I believe kids behavior is more influenced by their parents’ example than it is by trying to tell them what to do all the time.

Anyway, as you can see in the pictures, Kai is also talented when it comes to posing for the camera.

I have a whole bunch of photos of Kai and Eidan to share. There are too many to post all at once, so I’m going to try to post them in sets over the rest of the week. Here’s the first batch.

Over the past six weeks or so Eidan has gone from getting up just once or twice a night to getting up about once every hour. Maria and I have become massively sleep deprived as a result. It’s amazing how little sleep you can get by with, once you adapt yourself to it. I’m not suggesting you try it though: when I say “get by” I mean you have to avoid meetings (as you’ll definitely fall asleep just sitting around listening to people talk), you probably shouldn’t drive, and forget about anything that involves the use of medium term memory (i.e. you can remember last year just fine, and you can remember 30 seconds ago just fine, but anything in between…maybe not).

We went through the same thing with Kai, and agonized over what to do about it. The one thing we weren’t prepared for as parents was how to deal with sleep problems. It’s the one aspect of parenting where you’ll find wildly different advice from all sorts of people with “MD” or “PhD” after their name. The advice ranges from “cry it out” to “the family bed” and everything in between. Reading online parents’ forums didn’t help either, as we found they were populated mainly by parents who were at their wits end (and therefore probably not the best sources of advise), and by folks I can only describe as “family bed” militants, who seem to believe there is a special circle of hell reserved for parents who let their infants cry.

We started four nights ago with the Ferber method, and we’ve been making good progress. Eidan is down to one hour-long wake up per night now (11-12 last night; 2-3 the previous night). We would have started sooner, but Maria’s mom was visiting, and we didn’t want to keep her up (not to mention that she vehemently disagrees with the Ferber approach…).

Personally, I’ve learned that I’m addicted to sleep: give me less, and I want more; give me more, and I want more . Here’s to the whole family sleeping through the night by the end of the week!

Michiko (Maria’s mom) is visiting us for a couple weeks, and she’s helping us a lot with taking care of Eidan. The only trouble is she keeps calling him Elton – we’re not sure why (actually, I think it started when we were listening to Elton John in the car the other day…). She also has quite a talent for mixing metaphors – the title is from something she said at dinner last night. But she has yet to top my high school gym teacher, who I remember saying, in a moment of of attempted inspiration, “sometimes you gotta take the bull by the hand.”

Anyway, as you can see Elton…I mean Eidan, is fat and happy these days…