New Years 2008

This picture just worked better in Black/White

One of the big traditions in Japan at New Years time is the trip to the temple to pray for good luck in the coming year. While Ritsy and I are not really religious people, we do believe that it doesn't hurt to just not tempt fate, be respectful to life, nature and to ask for safe passage. I do think it didn't work out too well for me last year, with the numerous trips to Temples in Nara- and my leg still got fractured so close to my baby's birth...
But we decided to lug little Ken out to Gansuiji temple on the 2nd. As I believe I mentioned, the temple is very popular for praying for babies, so it was a good fit. The other key point being that Gansuiji is so close to our home. Ken looked quite amused up to this point.
It was a pretty nasty cold day though, so we had to hurry along to do our business. At the front gate, they had their traditional New Years decorations out.
We went to the main shrine and said our Pleases and Thank yous. The shrine was decorated by a number of very colorful flags (not sure what the relevance is) and a thousand paper cranes as shown in the next picture.
Finally we had to hurry back to the car as Ken was not too happy about the cold weather, and I can't say that I blame him. It was pretty nasty.

cell phone pics

The focus around the household has definitely shifted to Ken. Through the first 2 weeks at home, I was still working a fair bit, so I would just have little snatches of time to spend with him- but now that my holidays kind of started on Saturday- and started full tilt on Thursday- I have had a great chance to just hang out with him.
He does spend a lot of time sleeping. And crying. And eating. And dirtying his diapers. But there are some times when he is just lying there and looking around. I read that this is the time to interact with him- and I think he is starting to love the interactions. By listening to him while he tries to practice his sounds, it helps him to get some much needed practice- after all, the poor bugger has two whole languages to learn.
I really have made an effort not to turn my blog into a "hey look at all the cute pictures of my cat" blog- because I realize that isn't an interesting read. I hope the new baby-centered focus you will see is not a bad turn. I will try to keep some other topics coming. This really is a great venue to document those changes that come along that, at the time, are somewhat minor, but you pause to reflect on later in life.
So far- he has already started lifting his neck- especially when we burp him. He is great for swinging his neck around and headbutting us right in the mouth. Cute but dangerous. Also he has started to make tears, though his cries are mostly dry, and he has also starting focusing more and he watches us as we walk around the house. Oh ya, also a couple of real smiles and a little bit of agoo's and lela's. Pretty fun stuff.

An Aside
Both pictures didn't turn out very well but, I still thought this was amusing.
A lot of places around here have the classic- squat and use toilets here, like this...
Well one place that I was working at had handy instructions posted for a foreigner on how to use these porcelain beauties. Unfortunately I had to be discreet as someone else was in the washroom, so the pictures came out blurry. He must have thought that I was taking some perverse pictures with the door closed, oh well - I wasn't....

Things settling....?!?!?!?

Yes, time is starting to move on and my schedule is lightening up and things seem to be starting to fall into place. Ritsy and Ken had spent the first few days at home in the living room where Santa was always trying to get in on the warm action. No problem as long as he doesn't try to lie down on Ken.
Ritsy was starting to feel better, and was moved into the baby's room by Monday. But going back a couple of days- Peter and Chris managed to convince me to come out to Hamamatsu city to celebrate the beginning of fatherhood. While I am weary of overdoing it , it had been a pretty stressful 2 weeks for me and it was really nice they wanted me to come out, so I headed into town for a couple of hours to a place called Liquid Kitchen- run by a guy we knew, Marty.
Even our other friend Peter came out and we saw one of Chris' students- in this picture is her friend. If I didn't know better I would say these two look like a nice couple...
We were good though and got home at a decent hour on the train.(hmm that poster looks oddly placed in the background)
This week was pretty busy too, but definitely starting to lighten up. I am also starting to understand why my students keep telling me to take lots of pictures. He has already changed in looks a lot in just 3 weeks. I actually see a little bit of me in this little face now! His hair is brown, though much darker than mine- but his eyes are dark-- well that light-coloured gene is a recessive one isn't it...?
He is a hungry bugger and seems to get really fussy at night- but we are learning and starting to minimize the fuss a little better little by little. Poor Ritsy was getting pretty tired though- yesterday I caught her having a nap with the little guy when I came home from work.
I know time is moving fast- I can't believe the little guy is already 3 weeks old! There will be lots of great times- but I am so interested to watch as he develops mentally and physically, I can't get enough- I am starting to get oya baka (Baby crazy)-- this is going to be a very interesting journey!

A positive turn

I just survived a crazy busy couple of weeks! I guess my week isn't really over, but I know my schedule lightens up a bit from this point, so I'll enjoy it.
I continued with a tough week of commuting to my classes, the hospital and the Midwife clinic and last week reached an end with me having to travel out to Shizuoka city early in the morning last Sunday to take my Japanese proficiency test (level 3). With the hectic pace of the previous week and the buildup in the week before that, my studying dropped off pretty steeply. I am not confident that I did well in the test, but I guess I earned valuable experience for when I have to retake the test next year! On the bright side, the color of the leaves on the ginkgo trees were quite beautiful in their autumnal richness!
Of course, following the the test I was able to make it back to town in time to visit both Ritsy and Ken.
Ritsy was feeling much better as she had opted for a transfusion the day before. I understand her original skepticism to do so with the controversy about people contracting Hepatitis C recently, but the doctor assured her the risk is small, and in the end it was definitely just what she needed. On Monday she was able to leave the hospital and join him at the midwife clinic for a couple of days. She was pretty happy!
Finally last night the family was united at home. Though Ritsy slept downstairs with Ken, and I upstairs with the cats, it sure feels nice to all be back together again!

The three corners

Even though the family has expanded over the last few days, it doesn't really feel that way right now. The three of us right now are in three separate corners of town- each of us going through our own issues.

For Ken the ordeal is pretty straightforward. He has spent 9 months in a nice, warm, safe womb and now he has been dumped out into this bright, cold and mind bogglingly complex world. He can barely see and doesn't even know why he feels compelled to suck down as much milk as his little stomach can handle. Even just burping looks like a lot of work- he's got a lot to learn.

I am most concerned about Ritsy. I mentioned that she had to go to the hospital after the birthing and was pumped full of fluids at the hospital. When I visited her yesterday, she seemed healthy and I thought that for sure she would be released from the hospital and be able to return to the Midwife clinic to reunite with Ken. Last night though she had a fever and today, her blood tests showed her to be quite anemic, she is really low on iron. When I saw her she was again looking healthy and had no fever, just frustrated that she can't see her son.

Luckily the doctor offered a great suggestion- Myself, her sister and the woman from the clinic went to the hospital carting along little Ken to finally see his mom. Unfortunately Ritsy once again had a fever and only could hang with him for a few minutes. I feel real bad for Ritsuko- she just wants to connect with the little guy- and feed him her milk and be happy. But she is stuck recovering and now I worry that because he is getting used to the bottle, it'll be tough for him to switch to breast milk later. Well, I'll try not to get wound up in a little knot over something I can't fix.
As for me, my ordeal is about my leg. I had my cast taken off on Monday but I am meant to only walk with about 30% weight bearing pressure. God, I'm a horrible judge of how much weight that means, especially if you consider you can potentially take thousands of step in a day. It's much easier just to think that I should try to walk 'lightly' and I think I will be okay. I'm actually back to using my crutches more than I did in the last 3 weeks before it came off. I am confident that my leg will improve a lot and quickly, I just need to keep patient with it.

Separate the 3 of us will have to fight our battles and get to the next level- I really look forward to when we can all sit down together quietly (well as quietly as it gets with a baby) and enjoy the true feeling that we are a big family.

Here is a little video of the guy doing nothing, but as a parent, I feel it is cute anyway. Please pardon me for using the I'm talking to a baby voice- I am trying to avoid doing that too much...

It's a boy!

I actually have known for some time the baby was going to be a boy, but I thought I would hold out before alerting blogger-space.

It was a tough couple of days. I guess it started on Thursday night. I was happily sleeping away, and woke up and noticed Ritsy was no longer in the bed. I went downstairs and saw that she was lying in discomfort and couldn't sleep. But there was still no contractions. At that time I was really worried about the baby- but I decided to wait a bit and see how things progress.

I went back to bed and the next morning Ritsy was still in discomfort and was going to call the midwife to see what she thought. I went off to work expecting to maybe not finish my work day. I had a day of work where I left home at about 7 in the morning and wouldn't return until 9:30 at night because of the locations of the classes. She started to have contractions but they were too far between. She went to the clinic a few times and sent back home. I made it through my day of work without "the call".

I arrived at home at about 9:30 and she was sitting in discomfort. Her contractions were still about 8 minutes apart. When they came down to 5 minutes apart (around 11:30 pm) we called her friend Kurami that was going to help with the delivery (she is a nurse with her midwife licence). She came over and helped out with the contraction pain. They told me maybe in an hour they would go to the clinic and I could sleep for a bit. I woke up 3 hours later and thought maybe they had forgotten about me. They hadn't - still waiting.

I stayed up with them through the morning, when the contractions got close together and more painful, we called the clinic and were told to come in at 7. The contractions continued for some time but were still pretty far apart. Man, those contractions look painful, I remember thinking and Ritsy turned to me and said it's going to get more painful. I gained a lot of respect for every woman that has given birth naturally-- it's like watching someone get tortured.

Finally around 1pm they went into the delivery room and asked me to wait outside the room. About an hour later, they called me and I could see the little bugger was crowning. I don't know if I was shocked or in awe at the sight of the baby coming out. It was something I really thought I couldn't watch, but a part of me told me that I had to. I don't regret it, I was able to see them cut the umbilical cord and clear out his mouth, and he took his first breath and started crying.
His name will eventually be Ken Trevor Lowrey-Takasugi. For now it's Ken Takasugi-I'll get into the whole name fiasco in another post. He weighed 4.1 kgs and was healthy. Official Time of birth was November 24th at 2:02 pm. Welcome little guy.

Naturally, when Ritsy first saw him she was crying tears of joy and probably partly tears of relief. I was still in a dazed shock/awe but was pretty surprisingly emotional. I guess it all clicks when you see the little guy, eh?

Well, we were told to go home after that (Ritsy's sisters and Nephew showed up and
hung around for it), looked like everything was good. I was even thinking about hooking up with Chris and Peter for a beer after a nap.

But an hour later while sleeping, both my cell phone and home phone rang at the same time. I picked up the home phone and Ritsuko's sister was on the line and told me that we were going to the hospital (Ritsy was staying in a midwife clinic, so they have no medical facility) because Ritsy's condition was not good. That conversation was stressful, because I didn't understand at first and then when I did figure out, I was worried. I had to wait through the drive there and about 30 minutes before I saw Kurami again (who works at this hospital usually) and she gave me the okay sign- everything was okay. Thank god for Kurami- she was just amazing- she stayed up all night, worked the birth and hopped to the hospital as soon as Ritsy went. We definitely want to do something to show our appreciation to her!

Yep Ritsy is okay now, she suffered a pretty big laceration while passing that big boy- so needed to get sutured up at the hospital. She needs to stay at the hospital a few days while recovering and then she can rejoin Ken at the midwife clinic.

What an emotional roller coaster of a day! In the end everyone is okay but separate, that will all change soon enough!

The waiting game

This picture was an accident, but I actually kind of liked it

Wow, thanks to everyone for the enquiries about the baby. It is definitely a bit of an anxious time awaiting the little one's arrival! Sadly, we're still waiting! Yesterday Ritsy was feeling like it might be time yesterday or today, but still nothing! I look forward to posting the first pictures!
While Christmas is not a Shinto holiday, the Japanese have taken to the commerciality of the holiday and some of the charming aspects of X-mas. One of those things is the Christmas lights and a lot of big companies make elaborate displays and they are called illuminations (or i-ru-mi-ne-shi-o-n). Here is the main display in Hamamatsu city called Winter firefly (but in Japanese), enjoy!

What's going on?

What's going on indeed!

I guess part of the more quiet pace I have been on with my injury, some my energy for blogging has sapped. Must stay on track! This whole blogging thing was meant to be an exercise for me to practice day to day focus, so it has been largely successful, but there's been a big tailing off the last couple of months. But, when we fall off that horse, we get back up again!
Mac: According to pictures stolen from Facebook, my sister's, son- Mac (because he looked like a big Hamburger when he came out, I think... :-)) was recently spotted dressed up as a big chicken. Pretty Funny costume! If you are wondering what my brother-in-law is dressed up as- I believe that is just one of his regular hats! Just kidding Sean! Well, also, using my detective skills, not having heard the story, it looks like he may have won a prize for his costume. Good Job, little guy!
Music: Most people know I love Radiohead- so I was pretty excited when they gave us 10 days notice last month and they offered up their new album only as a download. Plus we could pick the price. Pretty interesting move, though an established artist has a better chance of pulling it off than a struggling band. The initial offering of 10 songs is pretty good and filled with the usual ear candy that makes for great ear-phone or in-car listening, so was a solid release indeed! They had another option of purchasing a CD packaged with 2 LP's and a bonus disk- but the price of 40 pounds was pretty crazy. I will probably hold out until they strike a record deal to get the other new music. Oh, how much did I choose to pay? I thought 6 pounds (about 13 bucks Canadian) was fair, considering I probably will buy it on CD to get the songs at a better quality later on.

My Leg: Went back to the doctor last week and he said that my leg was healing slowly. Indeed, looking at the previous X-rays and the new ones, I couldn't see any difference whatsoever! Hmmph. He made a new cast with a good rubber heal and said that I could walk a little bit, concentrating the pressure on the heel of my foot. I am definitely more mobile- but I have probably been walking too much, so I hope it doesn't further slow my healing. The new cast is also removable so we can pull it off and wash the foot. I don't much like looking at my swollen and bruised foot, to be honest though!

The Train: Taking the train a lot the last couple of weeks, I have seen a lot of my old favorite employees of the local train- Aka Den, I remember I had created some 'names' for them- there was Creepy Smiley Guy, The Guy With Big Lips for example, but sadly- Unusually Tall Girl has not been spotted yet. It's good to see them all again, it reminds me of a year and a half ago before I had my car! Nazukashi!

Baby: Not yet!

Yep, I'm a little dry for topics right now- tough to grab the camera and go to check out a temple or whatnot, but I will get my groove back in no time!

A New Post!

Call the kids in! Phone your friends! Hamamatsu Life has an update! A new posting! And the lead picture is a generic, unreferenced one, it must be time for one of Todd's miscellaneous ramblings entries! Wow!

Sorry: Yep, I don't know what's been going on, my posts have been a little too much spaced out lately. I guess this week I had two new classes which I usually get a bit stressed about especially when trying to teach a new textbook. I tend to think that in the end the classes always work out fine but if I don't get worked up for the classes, I won't do as good a job- so it may be part of my successful recipe (it's one of my theories anyway). Well even though I haven't been typing in my blog, I often think about what to talk about when I am driving, so this is probably the by product of those thoughts!

Baby Talk: Ritsy finished work this week, and is now on Maternity Leave. I think it's great that she will have a month to relax now, it's going to get really busy for both of us, especially for her in about a month. And wow- that really feels real now- one month away from baby arriving. We actually heard the baby's sex now- but I'm not going to mention it here just yet- I want to personally tell a few people first. We already have a baby bed- thanks to Kouji-san, and we bought a new mattress and blankets for it. We also bought a stroller at a used goods shop and a car seat. So I think that is a good start. I even have been trying to read the What to Expect in the Baby's first year to be prepared for the challenges ahead. Progress is slow...

Baby Talk part 2: I watched the movie Knocked Up the other day and had a good chuckle. Of course the movie isn't for everyone- very adult themes like drugs, etc... Though in the movie the baby comes about thanks to a one night stand- the actual pregnancy and everything after that was somewhat relevant to me, so it was actually good to watch for my situation. Especially when they showed the picture of the baby crowning, that is something I have to work myself up to...

Death Hill: One of my new classes this week was in Morimachi(actually both of them were), which means that for the first time in a long time I had to go out in the direction where I had my accident earlier this year. Well, the old road is now gone, they built a new, much safer road through the hills. It is a gradual incline with a much lower apex and very good sight lines- the drive feels much safer now! Good job government of Hamamtsu!
Not Farewell, it's see you later : Ya it was kind of a sad feeling on Tuesday. Some of my regular students for my Tuesday night class that have been attending for around 2 years will not be joining next semester. So it felt like goodbye, though I hope that we will all stay in touch as they were not only great as students but we also had some great talks and a couple of fun times at Josh's place. Well if you guys are reading this, thanks again!
Lanma: Asked me to put her picture in my blog again, so there it is.

I will try to be more on top of posting again! Thanks for reading!

The state of the union

This sunset looked better live, but still kind of neat looking clouds.

Wow time is moving fast! It has been such an incredibly busy time the last 4 weeks, that I barely had time to be social or get enough 'me' time. But I am not complaining- all the extra work was exactly what I needed! Thanks a lot to Time Life, they really came through with a lot of work, and because of that I feel a little more comfortable heading into the next year!

And what a next year it will be- we're looking at (hopefully) less than 2 months away from the little one arriving! Ritsy will finish work at the end of this month and go on maternity leave. We finally found out about Sankyu (Maternity Pay). It looks like for the first 3 months, we won't see a dime of the mat pay, but after the initial 90 day period from when the baby arrives she will get a pretty good cheque. But after that her monthly pay will be pretty minimal- just enough so that she can still help me with the mortgage and she can make the payments on her car. Taking on the monthly bills will be tight for me, but I can breathe a little safer with some money in the bank (thanks to all the extra work recently!),especially during the leaner months. We also will get back about 350,000 yen for having the baby, but that will also take 3 months to come. I think we are ready for it, and if we survive with most of our savings in tact, we can still take our planned trip to Canada next year in April.

What else is happening? We had the Sports Day events last weekend for ESL College and it was pretty successful. I fed off the kids a little too much though and worked up quite a sweat! It was a long exhausting day, but I didn't care I had a good time!

This week has actually been quite restful for me. Thanks to one of my students calling in sick a couple of times over the last week, I have been able to enjoy a surprise day off and get a lot of rest today (even update my blog...). This month most of my regular class' contracts come to an end so I have to endure the usual anxiety of hoping that they all renew. Usually it all works out, but there are no certainties in life!

We might get a visit from Makoto next week- I hope he comes out, that could be fun!

Time for me to head off to work now! Here is another picture from last week of Ritsy and the 2 cats sleeping, those crazy sleepy kids.

Over 860 Served

I call this "Phallic Sky"

I noticed on my hit counter that there has been over 1000 visit to this website. While I should point out that I have probably created about 140 of those hits, I still think that is far more amazing than I would have expected! Thanks so much to everyone that has visited this website and to Chris and Hisano for linking to me in their blogs!

I have been enjoying practicing writing for the last little while and when I came to another site that was pointed out to me, I saw a post about the Tooth Fairy and I had a streak of inspiration. So I wrote it and put it up at that site. But since it's a lot like some of my wacky blog posts I thought I might link to it here if you want to read it. It's about saying bless you (western tradition) and throwing beans at demons (Japanese tradition) -HERE.

Some are wondering how Ritsy now is lookingwith being pregnant and all, well, surprisingly skinny still. Though she seems to be hitting a point where she looks a little more pregnant every few days. This picture was taken on the night of Josh's concert...

Babies and insects

A leftover Sakura picture that has nothing to do with today's post!

Middle of July already! It's crazy that now in about 4 months I will be a dad- it doesn't get driven home any clearer than that! We are currently investigating where to have the baby. You used to be able to deliver in woman's clinics or hospitals, but the law changed fairly recently so that you can't have the baby in a clinic anymore. But this is where I get confused, apparently there is a type of clinic known as a "midwife's clinic" there you can, in fact deliver. I don't get what the difference is between a mid-wife and a clinic doctor, but apparently the mid-wife is more qualified in case of emergency? Well, I am not sure of the reasoning behind it, but the bonus is that the clinics are typically cheaper than the hospitals- so Ritsy went today to meet with the Mid-wife clinic to see if she is able to deliver the baby there. If not we will probably have to choose the local University hospital- Idai, as it is the most reasonable priced.
There is actually a closer hospital that they are just completing the building on. It's probably within a kilometer from my house, but the hospital is slated to open in November- since we are expecting in November there has been concern about the state of preparedness the hospital will be in by that time.

I picked up the baby bed from my student Koji yesterday, it's so nice to have people offering stuff like that- every little bit counts!
I got an e-mail from one of my previous students yesterday, his wife just had a baby and he sent me the picture! Congrats Harry!
This insect freaked me out when it flew into my car last week. I have no idea what it is ( long horned beetle?) but it was quite big and had no business being in my car! I don't really like Beetles very much (though I do like The Beatles), they are quite popular with the kids in Japan, but they remind me of cockroaches with long horns or antlers...

My Monday Musings

It's Monday- which means back to work! I am finally caught up on my tales from April and May so it is back to my regular topics! Not as exciting as excursions and parties, but I will try!

Everything is still progressing well with Ritsy- doctor says we are at 5 months now and junior is at 110 grams. She brought in a videotape from the sonogram but I haven't watched it yet. She still isn't showing, but I think pretty soon she will start to develop a belly. Man, it's really happening.
The house across from mine seems to be getting torn down. It used to be a dog kennel where they bred Welsh Corgi's but I met the man that lived there last year, Suzuki, and he told me they had to close down the business. He even offered to give us a free dog, but I actually find that breed quite annoying. I was surprised to see that he had to move away as well though- he was my only neighbour that could speak some English! But as we heard the machines working away one day and walked over to the other side we could see the house was now just a shell!
My other neighbour (ironically also named Suzuki) was telling my wife she is worried that they may build an apartment building there, but I am not so worried about that idea. I think a denser populated area could help the property value of my home improve.
Now is the season for the rice crops, so the fields have been getting flooded and we can see farmers planting them. The rice season usually coincides with the Rainy Season here in Japan as you can imagine the skies provide plenty of water for the rice to flourish. Here is a farmer working on his flooded field.