Blogtober 19: fish are friends

You know the expression “more haste, less speed”? That was totally me this morning.

The baby usually wakes up anywhere between 5:30 and 6am, but for reasons entirely unknown this morning she decided to sleep in until just after 7am. Amazing!! BUT, as luck would have it, today was actually a day I wanted to be up and ready to go pretty early, so everything was thrown off. So there I was, rushing around trying to get everything done in order to leave the house on time, and… just as I picked up my rain poncho from the hook on the back of the door, I carelessly knocked the beautiful glass wind chime (Kira, it was you who gave it to me, wasn’t it) and it fell to the floor in the genkan with a heartbreaking smash and shattered into a million, tiny pieces.

Argh! 😭😭😭 If memory serves me adequately, it had travelled with me from Tokyo to Saitama to Osaka to Fujisawa and now to our current home, so I am extremely sad.

But the dog is free to wander around the house so I couldn’t just leave the broken glass there to deal with when we came back, of course. So everything gets put on hold for another ten minutes while I try to make sure no tiny splinters of broken wind chime glass are hiding anywhere.

And then we’re off! Finally! Only about an hour and a half later than I wanted to leave. Where did we go?

To the aquarium again! But this time it was not to see the nautilus or the lumpsuckers, or even the jellyfish or the rays, but my friend who runs Tiny Tot in Tokyo (which I have linked before and continue to recommend as an excellent parenting-in-Japan blog). Baby A is about (counts on fingers) 9 months older than my baby, and had a bunch of clothes that she’d grown out of, and that Kay very kindly donated! They are all really lovely and a great match for the sort of thing I would choose normally, so I am absolutely over the moon. This is the first time I’ve met an actual mamatomo (mum friend) with whom I am actually friends (as opposed to the people in the baby sign language class whom I literally just met), and had conversation in English, and it was wonderful. Baby A seemed to really enjoy looking at all the sea life, Baby N enjoyed watching both the fish and Baby A, and Kay’s husband ran around a lot trying to keep Baby A from escaping or climbing into the penguin enclosure or something. All in all, a really lovely few hours.

And then it rained! So once we got back home I was really cold and in need of a hot cup of tea, and Baby N was ready for a good long nap.

I’m really looking forward to trying some of these “new” clothes on her ✨ At least the weather is forecast to be less gloomy tomorrow!