elijah started to go to the japanese school here in saskatoon since september last year.  the class takes place every sunday morning for two hours.  elijah is in the preschool class and i help out as a teacher’s aide.  i make materials and do some drawings for them.

we had a school play day at the end of march.  elijah’s class did a traditional russian story called “the great big turnip“.  for this play, i painted the background image.

there are six characters in this story — grandpa, grandma, grandchild, dog, cat, and mouse.  we have 8 kids in our class, so we told them to pick the role they like and we could have two of the same character.

everyone picked a character except elijah.  at that point, all the roles were taken.  so we told him that he can be any character he wants.  so he picked…

an elephant.

「ぞうさんに、な、り、た〜い！(i want to be an elephant!!)」

he said that out loud standing on his chair.

then, he told me the day before the play that there is no elephant in the story…

too late, elijah!!

sharing is important…

elijah is good at sharing. but when it comes to cherries, it’s a different story…

“elijah, can i have some of your cherries, please?”

“NO~! this is my CHERRIES! DON’T EAT MY CHERRRRRRRIES! THIS IS MINE!”

ame nimo makezu, by kenji miyazawa

not losing to the rain

not losing to the rain
not losing to the wind
not losing to the snow or to the heat of the summer
with a strong body
unfettered by desire
never losing temper
cultivating a quiet joy
every day four bowls of brown rice
miso and some vegetables to eat
in everything
count yourself last and put others before you
watching and listening, and understanding
and never forgetting
in the shade of the woods of the pines of the fields
being in a little thatched hut
if there is a sick child to the east
going and nursing over them
if there is a tired mother to the west
going and shouldering her sheaf of rice
if there is someone near death to the south
going and saying there’s no need to be afraid
if there is a quarrel or a suit to the north
telling them to leave off with such waste
when there’s drought, shedding tears of sympathy
when the summer’s cold, walk in concern and empathy
called a blockhead by everyone
without being praised
without being blamed
such a person
I want to become

(translation from wiki)

it was probably not a good idea to go on a bicycle ride yesterday — it was sunny, but cool and very windy.  we wanted to try out our chariot, the bike carrier, for the first time this summer.

now elijah and i have a cold.

his nose was running and i was coughing all afternoon today.  elijah noticed that i wasn’t feeling well.

he asked me ::

イライジャ　「ママ、どうしたの？どうした？」

ママ　「ママ、ちょっと、喉が痛いよ」

イライジャ　「チューしてあげる」

（喉にキスと撫ぜ撫ぜ）

イライジャ　「もう大丈夫になった？」

ママ　「もう大丈夫だよ」

elijah: “what’s the matter, mama?  what’s the matter?”

mama: “my throat hurts a bit, mama.”

elijah: “(i’ll) give you a kiss.”

(gives me a kiss on my throat and pets me)

elijah: “has (it) got better now?”

mama: “i’m okay now.”

he was super-sweet and i didn’t want to miss this sweet opportunity.

so i asked him ::

ママ　「ママ、目も痛いよ。チューしてください。」

イライジャ　（チュッ）

ママ　「右のほっぺも痛いです。」

イライジャ　（チュッ）

ママ　「左も」

イライジャ　(笑って）　「痛くないよ～。もう、大丈夫だよ～。」

(笑いながら走って逃げる）

mama: “mama, my eyes hurt, too.  please give me a kiss”

elijah: (kiss)

mama: “my right cheek hurts too”

elijah: (kiss)

mama “left one, too”

elijah: (laugh) “(it) doesn’t hurt!  (you’re) all right now.”

(ran away, laughing)

once in awhile, having a cold isn’t too bad.

three years ago on setsubun day (february 3rd), i debuted as an oni for the first time.  this year, panda-san volunteered to become oni!  initially i tried to put the plastic oni mask onto elijah — silly me.  elijah said a definite “no!” and threw the mask away like trash, running out of the room laughing with victory.  i grabbed him and tried again but he went limp and slipped through my arms.  

i made some maki-sushi with tofu and vegetables.  elijah skillfully peeled off the nori and ate the rice and tofu.  you’re supposed to eat as many roasted soybeans as your age but they were too crunchy for him.  so i made cooked soybeans instead for easy digestion.  

“who is this man anyway?”

“ah~, panda-san!”

happy setsubun!

june 8th, 2008.  a minute after he was born…

1 month

2 months

3 months

4 months

5 months

6 months

7 months

8 months

9 months

10 months

11 months

12 months

i’ve been having an awesome time playing with elijah.  we play all day from dawn til nightfall.  he’s running around all the time.  and he’s started saying a few words that i can understand.

elijah loves spending time outside.  he’s always running up to the screen door and trying to push it open.  i have to keep it locked so he doesn’t get out on his own.   if i ask him ‘out?’, he bangs on the door and say ‘ahhtoh~, ahhtoh~’.  if i say ’shoes’ he goes to the entranceway and grabs his sandals, even if i don’t gesture or point.  once we get ready to go, he is so proud to step out of the doorway on his own.

we go to a park a few blocks up the street from our house almost every day.  he runs around on the grass pulling out the dandelions, saying, ‘ahwuh~, ahwuh~’ (‘flower’).  he likes to break open the seeds of the dandelions after they go white.  he points at dogs we meet, saying ‘dahh~, dahh~!!’ very loudly.  he’s always noticing birds flying in the sky or sitting on the grass in the park.  whenever he spots a bird, he points at it and says, ‘burrrrr! burrrr!’ and looks to make sure i notice it too.

at home,  he tries to dig around in everything possible.  he takes a bunch of stuff out of a dresser drawer, then puts it back in, he repeats the process many times, non-stop.  he goes into the food pantry and brings me a box of something (usually the box of brita water filters).  he climbs up on the low buffet table and presses all the buttons on the phone and answering machine.  he’s always erasing all the messages and recording his own chatty voice as the answering machine message.   he always wants to play with the non-baby items in the house: the phone (he likes the real phone more than his toy phone), the computer, the stereo, any remote control.  a couple of times he’s been playing with the stereo buttons when there’s music playing and suddenly turned the volume knob all the way to maximum. that made him cry with surprise.

he wants to feed himself all the time.  he pushes away the spoon if anyone tries to give him a bite.  he’s not that interested in most finger foods like cheerios anymore.  he wants to eat with a fork or spoon, even though he makes a big mess.  his favorite food right now is apple pieces.  he knows the word ‘apple’ and can say it clearly when he sees a photo of an apple, or a drawing of an apple, or a pile of apples in the grocery store.  after the meal he brushes his teeth.  of course, he wants to do it himself.

he is climbing up and down from things.  he knows the word ‘up’ and asks us to pick him up or take him somewhere.   he’ll ask other people to pick him up sometimes, like the cashier at the grocery store.  when he says ‘up’ he holds his arms straight up towards us and twists his hands back and forth as fast as he can.  now that he can get up on so many things (the low coffee table, the small armchair, the bench near the window, not to mention the stairs), we’ve been teaching him how to get down safely.  he knows to turn on his stomach and gradually go backwards so his feet touch the floor first.  he does this getting down from our bed (it’s a tall bed), even though he has to fall a bit before his feet hit the floor.  he says ‘dahh’ (‘down’) when he’s doing this technique.

when he wants to hear a story, he takes all his books out of the cupboard and brings them to me one by one.  when i tap on my thigh, he crawls onto my lap and i read him stories. his favorite books right now are: ‘don’t let the pigeon drive the bus!‘, ‘don’t let the pigeon stay up late‘, ‘DOG‘, ‘bossy bear‘, ‘tamahiyo doubutsu‘, ‘tamahiyo misete‘, ‘dr. seuss’s abc‘ and mama’s japanese novels.  he likes it when we say lines from his favorite books at other times during the day, like when i’ll do the pigeon’s voice saying “first of all, i’m not even tired… in fact, i’m in the mood for a hot dog party!!”

i read ‘dr. seuss’s abc’ to him before he goes to bed.  his favorite character is ‘itchy itchy ichabod’.  sometimes i can only manage to read till the letter B before he starts saying  ‘oppa~, oppa~’ (‘oppai’, the japanese word for breast/breast milk)’ and putting his arm inside my shirt to grab onto my oppai.  he does that in public sometimes, so i have to be careful i’m not on parade.

after breastfeeding, it’s time for bed.  he starts sleeping in his crib every night now.  he usually wakes up a couple of times before coming to bed with us early in the morning.   he likes to start the day early, like at 6:30 or even 5:15, so i have to get some sleep to get ready for the next big day.

13 months

the fifth of may is a japanese holiday called ‘kodomo no hi‘ (children’s day). the holiday used to be called ‘boy’s day’, but the government decided to rename it children’s day to celebrate the happiness of all children. we still celebrate boys on this day since there is a girl’s day on the third of march.

for boy’s day, we raise a carp flag (koi nobori) and display dolls in samurai armor. one of the dolls represent ‘kintaro‘. kintaro was raised in the mountains by his mother. kintaro rides a bear instead of a horse. the animals of the forest became his friends due to his gentle nature. eventually kintaro joins up with a Samurai clan and helps to defeat a gang of demons. kintaro is a symbol of a healthy and strong boy.

i don’t have carp flags or the dolls yet, so i made an origami kabuto and jinbei kimono for elijah. i happened to have a kintaro bib. i tried to put a paper origami kabuto on his head, but he ate it. here he is on his rocking moose.

i hope he had fun on his first boy’s day. or maybe he’s sick of being a model…

you probably know this, but babies cry. they don’t just cry. they cry like the universe is ending and our life is actually a total farce. elijah barely cried at all during the first couple of days, while we were still in hospital. paul and i were saying to each other, ‘hey, our baby doesn’t cry!’. needless to say, we were fooling ourselves. he started crying hard in our car driving home from the hospital. his face was so red that i thought he was feeling pain or something. it was probably him feeling something different in the air that would tell him he was no longer in the womb. it must have been pretty shocking — i thought he’d blow out the windows. i’m pretty sure his crying voice reached the top of mount everest.

when he was hungry, he wouldn’t cry too hard and his crying would cease when i fed him. but as the night fell and he got tired, he would cry harder and harder. building from loud crying up to ‘i can’t believe anyone is capable of crying this hard’ crying. paul used to say it was like a gear shift; 1st gear: mild conversational crying, up to 5th gear: unbelievable death-metal crying. i was thinking it was more like 28th gear. i used to visualize being blown away by the sound of his screaming and floating in the soundless universe.

he would start crying around 8pm. he was very punctual – true yamato spirit. paul and i used to joke around by counting down to 8pm and bang! he would start crying. it wasn’t that precise but close enough. we looked for an on/off switch or a volume dial in his body, but we couldn’t find anything like that. i guess babies in canada don’t come with such features. so we did our best to calm him down and make him comfortable by rocking and walking and cuddling etc. some people said he was colicky, but i think he was just sensitive and punctual. after pondering why he was crying that hard, paul and i came to think that he needed to get his extra energy out to help himself fall asleep.

it must have been hard for him to get used to a different situation – from the womb to the outside world. as an experiment, i sank my body in a warm bath and got out from it and saw how it would feel. it felt very cold and alone since there was nothing wrapping me anymore. maybe that’s how he felt too.

once he fell asleep, he usually didn’t cry hard in the middle of night, only when he wanted to be fed (every 2 to 3 hours). but suddenly, when he was four months old, he started crying all day and all night. his first tooth was coming in. no wonder he was putting his fingers or whole fist in his tiny mouth a lot. it must have been very painful and uncomfortable. after a few days, he settled down back to his usual pattern.

the magical day came at the beginning of the fifth month, in november. he just stopped crying that — cold turkey. he was like a different person. he still cries when he can’t get what he wants, but now he doesn’t just cry and cry for no reason. nowadays, when he cries, he sounds angry, not helpless.

to be honest, it has been pretty hard to get used his crying voice and to have to deal with all of the things he wants every single day. i didn’t want to get too stressed out because i didn’t want elijah to get a negative feeling. so i’ve had to find a way to go through this period somewhat positively.

mentality-wise:

• i used to ask elijah to cry even harder. since it’s an endurance game in a way, if i tried to stop him from crying, it would just accelerate my stress level because sometimes he just didn’t stop crying. so i said to him, ‘go ahead and cry. i know it’s a tough life. it’s okay to cry’. he would go ahead to cry even harder, but wish granted, i didn’t feel as bad as before.
• paul would pretend to cry even harder than elijah could. elijah realized he was not the only one who was crying – no prince treatment. he seemed shocked by it – rival!
• i would use his crying time for my exercise hour. since i had to rock and walk him for awhile, i might as well use the time for my own sake. i would work on my legs by doing squats. the longer he cried, the better. i got some exercise done – hurrah!
• teamwork. when i thought i couldn’t handle it, i gave elijah to paul and got the hell out of the room and be alone. paul was working long hours so this chance didn’t come very often, but even a few minutes of alone time refreshed me a lot and felt energized to go back to take care of him.

equipment and technique:

• hot sling. i used this a lot when elijah was very tiny. it wrapped him as if he was in the womb. he looked comfortable and right down to sleep. he outgrown this very quickly. i probably used it for a few months only.
• baby bjorn. this was useful since paul was able to put it on too. very comfortable. shoulder supports let us carry him without much pain. i used it to go for a walk everyday. he would stop crying once he was outside — once again, uchi-soto yamato spirit! and also we used it whenever we took him with us to buy groceries.
• bouncing ball. i have a big white exercise ball that i bought for decorative purposes. turns out this was very useful to rock elijah as i was able to rest my arms on my lap.
• swing. we should have bought one earlier — we got it just a month before he learned to sit up and pull himself out of it. elijah seemed to like being rocked to sleep — he had a few afternoon naps with this.
• making white noise by saying gentle and rhythmic ’shhhhh’ sound in his ear. this was maybe the best trick. it always helped him calm down. but now that he’s older, if i try this he just cries harder.

if you are new parents and going through this tough period, hang in there. it’s tough, but this period won’t last forever. soon, you’ll be seeing happy baby smiles all around. ganbatte kudasai!

watanabe mari