Band aid art

We got flu shots recently.

The nurses gave the boys their choice of homemade/home decorated bandaids. They all chose the same one. See if you can guess what it is:

Was it An Pan Man? Mr. Toast? Or their many friends?

Nah....It's Shinkansen!

Sweet English

It's not as easy as it used to be to find bad English in Japan. But there is still some low-hanging fruit.

Posting these, I am poignantly aware that my Japanese is awful. I ask to read bikes, drink waffles, climb bills in restaurants, and so on. Plus, and I find it unfair to poke fun at any country's attempts at English, when the English-speaking country I live in makes almost no effort to embrace multi-lingual education.

So I picked the cute stuff. (If you want to see a full collection as well as commentary, you'd click here)

Our dish soap:

This yogurt is truly delicious. (It's also best friends with Darrin's mini beer.)Some socks I bought at the 100 yen store:I took this picture for the name, but also to show off the excellent packaging. It's gum!

Here's my new apron. It keeps me clean, and enhances my figure! (Do you want one too? Just name your color).

Work? What work?

I can take a hint. Some of you have been asking me about how my work is going. So to prove to you how hard I have been working, I have not blogged in four nights!

You imply that there is supposed to be something substantive to our year here--something other than sampling every 100 yen shop and conveyor belt sushi restaurant in Kyoto.

Or taking pictures of cute stuff that is posed outside of stores, like this thing:

Or this:

But so far nothing has been quite as cute as this baby, S-chan:

Her hair stands straight up off of her head...and see those leg warmers? Good thing they don't cover up her cute chunky thighs.

We bought three bikes from S-chan's parents--one for Darrin and one each for Alek and Hugo. The parents were incredibly nice....and the mom? Well let's just say that if I could do a homestay with her, my Japanese would be 10 times better by now. She is a great teacher. Among other things, she cared enough to tell me that I was asking if Alek could "try to read this bike" rather than "try to ride this bike. "

Another bike buying story--we got Max's bike (and a new basket for my Mama Chari--granny bike) from the bike store that is about 30 feet away from our house. But since we didn't find good kids' bikes there, we had taken the bus out to a place we had passed on our trip to Arashiyama. And as we're filling out the paperwork for the new bikes (and playing with S-chan), her dad says, "that's your street? I grew up on that street!!" Not only that, we had bought Max's bike from S-chan's granddad! So cool.

We made sure to invite S-chan's parents to visit our house the next time they come and see the grandparents. At least, I hope I invited them to visit our house. I might have invited them to visit our horse.....

Cuteness in milk

The boys get cold milk at school everyday in these adorable, reusable glass bottles.