paul, elijah and i have been living temporarily in london, ontario since the beginning of may. it’s been so much fun living here.

if i have to choose three things that i need to live in a city, they would be…

1. a small river
2. parks
3. a farmer’s market

this city has it all.

elijah and i hit a park or two everyday. there is no shortage of parks here — parks everywhere! the thames river runs through the city and there are parks all along the riverside.  the city of london is nicknamed ‘the forest city’. mature trees covers the entire city. leaves rustle, birds sing, and the sun dapples gently on your face. elijah is examining a hole in the ground with a dandelion. i feel completely refreshed!

five minutes’ walk from our apartment takes us to victoria park. elijah and i go there in the morning to check out squirrels, birds, and interesting branches and weeds.  he’s started to say a few words. he points at a bird and says ‘burr~, burr~’. i think he’s trying to say ‘bird’.

we met a cute baby girl at the park. she was 16 months old. elijah is into older women (not much choice yet). he was acting shy at first, but then he decided to make a move.

he gave her a blade of grass and a dandelion with the seeds pulled off.  but when she was tried to grab his pine cone, he started to run away.

‘mine!’

elijah is big in japan.  i mean it literally.  when we went back to japan over the holidays, we stayed in wakayama, kyoto and tokyo. everywhere we went, people said to us, ‘he’s so big! Soooo big!’.

elijah’s also big in canada. he’s now almost 8 months old and weighs almost 10kg.  he’s on the 90th percentile growth curve.  i can feel it in my arms — more and more muscle.

it’s been a crazy couple of weeks since we got back from japan. finally i have some time to organize photos from our trip.

here are some photos from a subway ride in kyoto.  a bunch of high school girls came up to us saying ‘kawaii, kawaii!’ to elijah. they surrounded us in the subway train and took a lot of photos of elijah with their cell phones.

one of the girls gave him a chiroru choco (a popular bite-size chocolate).  her friends teased her saying it’s too soon for a baby to eat chocolate.  she was very sweet.  she put the chocolate back in her pocket, but then she snuck it under elijah’s leg as we were getting ready to get off the train.

of course, paul and i ate the chocolate. it was the sweetest chocolate.

swing, swing, swing…

i wanted to draw a giraffe, but i didn’t have a photo of giraffe handy. so i used my drawing, “there you are!” as a reference. this giraffe looks different from the previous one. i can’t draw exactly the same thing twice. for flower, i drew calla lily, because it’s one of my favorite flowers.

i drew this a few weeks ago.

16 x 20″

my mom keeps asking me to draw something cheerful. i thought i’ve been drawing something cheerful :D i guess not.

i want my mom to be happy, so i started to draw this. see! the girl is smiling :D nothing more cheerful than a girl smiling with an elephant sticking out of her belly.

it’s not done yet.

i found a photograph of a little boy holding an egg (it’s a goose egg). the boy had curly blond hair but i switched it to black straight hair. and the egg… is going to be a useful organ instead.

…you were my friend…

colour pencil drawing on paper (9 x 12″). this original drawing will be for sale on my online shop. the writing on the left says the same thing in japanese. it’s written in the real japanese: kansai dialect.

freshly drawn yesterday.

i knew something was living inside me…

UPDATE: i’ve made prints of this drawing, and postcards, available in my SHOP.