11 months old

I'm fighting the cold (seems like the flu this time) bug as I type out this blog, my second in the month of April alone. Actually the same goes for Minori and daddy. In both cases, it started with Minori, and we got it from there. Our immune systems are just not strong enough to fight it when she sneezes and coughs into our faces, which she loves doing for some reason.

Minori is really at a fun age now. She just started walking around the apartment with "weights" -- her toys, her baby lotion, books, the 2-litre bottle of sports drink, etc. The apartment is now a constant mess. She lugs stuff from the kitchen into the living room and vice versa. Yesterday she somehow figured out a way to open the CD cases and now some of our CDs have her fingerprints on them. Our favorite trick for Minori to do is the "ina bauer". When we say ina bauer, she raises both arms on cue as if to bend backwards. It's hillarious to watch. Should we send a video of it to NHK? "Ina bauer" will probably be one of the buzzwords of the year (the tv station NHK makes an annual top 10 list of buzzwords).

On some days, it seems like Minori just doesn't stop babbling. She picks up the tiniest things from the floor and goes "ditty, ditty" -- my hygiene-conscious (obsessed?) mom taught her how to say "dirty". She points to the banana and for fun, says "nana," but when we give her some, she just spits it out.

Suddenly our baby seems like a toddler. We want her to remain a baby forever but apparently she just can't wait to grow up.

All curled up

"OK will you stop laughing already!"

Minori in a hairband-hairpiece combo grandma plonked onto her head while walking by a hair accessory shop.

Mino-ni

This will never get on David Letterman's show but...

Q: What's better than a Minori?
A: Two Minoris.

Minori having fun with the Photobooth software on daddy's new iMac. (Note: "ni" in Japanese is the number "two")

The dreaded nursery drop-off

Minori started going to half-day nursery last week. Drop-off time every day was a cry fest, for both Minori and mommy. It was heart wrenching to see her cry as though she was being abandoned. The teachers (and the other foreign moms in my Yahoo! Group) assure us that this is typical first-month-at-nursery behavior. So why weren't the other babies crying, I asked myself. At 10 months old, Minori is probably going through separation anxiety, and seems to be the oldest in her class and the most sensitive to her new surroundings. I was told that the crying was less frantic last Friday when daddy alone dropped her off.

She caught a cold over the weekend and for fear of it being contagious to the other babies, she didn't go to nursery for the last 3 days. Are we back to square one with the crying when she returns to nursery tomorrow???

First steps

Despite coming down with a cold, Minori took her first wobbly steps today, at 10-and-a-half months old. Omedetou!

She looked like a penguin.

Shearing sheep n racing pigs

It felt like we were in a countryside either in Australia or New Zealand. We wish. It was Maza Bokucho (Mother Farm) in Chiba but it was fun anyway. We had actually planned to pick strawberries there but arrived too late (the lady said, "come by nine a.m. and you'd have a good chance of getting into the greenhouse"... yeah right... that means leaving home at 7am! I love strawberries but I love sleep better ;) ). They have a daily limit of the number of people who pick the stawberries so that there'll be enough strawberries to go around every day.

The land was vast. Cows were grazing, sheep were begging for food, bunnies burrowing, and ducks laying eggs. There were pig races and dog shows. People get to try their hand at milking cows, bungee jumping and riding horses. Lots of flowers and a few fruit orchards (strawberries, blueberries and kiwis mainly). There is even an amusement park for those who don't like feeling they are in a farm for an entire day. Minori had a time of her life!

We thought it wouldn't be crowded because it was the final day of the Japanese fiscal year. Although it's the school vacation, fathers would be too busy at work to bring their families to the farm, we thought. We got half of it right. Fathers probably stayed in the office to close off the fiscal year. Kids arrived in throngs with mommy and grandparents.

It's great bringing up children here in Japan.