Look what we woke up to this morning!!!

FrostToo cold for JJ!

y!

Nativity Day!

Finally, all the rehearsals have come to an end! The first show was this afternoon, and the kids did really well. Mia was one of 5 angels, who unfortunately sat at the side of the stage for the most part, so I wasn’t able to get many decent photos of her:

What a little angel!

Some of her little friends were “The Grandchildren” including Gabe who was “A Bright Boy”:

"The Grandchildren" with Gabe in the tie!

And of course we had the traditional shepherds AND their sheep! :



Shepherds AND sheep!

The Three Kings / Wise Men (I always get confused with these ones) along with servants and camels:

3 Kings, Servants and Camels

And of course, Mary and Joseph:

Mary & Joseph

Check out this link to YouTube for Mia’s angel dance in the play:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zJRWmtmjp8

And this link showing the whole cast in the finale:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9P1dQx7tpM –  You can see Mia standing to the far left of the stage.

In other news, congratulations to Edwina and Neil on the birth of the adorable Thea Olivia last week:

The gorgeous Thea-chan

I drove down to Tring to see them yesterday which was a bloody long way! Longer than I remember anyway, and I tagged a trip to Hatfield on to it to visit everyone at Ocado – it took me about 3 hours to get home! But at least it wasn’t snowing! I’m not used to driving the single carriageway roads with the national speed limit anymore so I was a bit like Cameron Diaz in the mini in The Holiday on the road from Swindon to Oxford and then on the A41 into Aylesbury!

In the last 2 weeks or so no less than FOUR friends of mine have had baby girls! Many congratulations to Akiko and Kentaro, Von and Takashi, Edwina and Neil and Jun and Amy who had a beautiful baby girl named Hazel on Dec 13th.

Other plans for this week: tomorrow is the second nativity performance, and then Thursday I am visiting a friend (Liz) for a coffee. The last day of school is Friday the 17th, and then this weekend is going to be a quiet one (hopefully!) before the storm of the week building up to Christmas.  Can’t believe we only have 3 weeks left in the UK! PArt of me is looking forward to returning to Tokyo, another part of me is really going to miss the chocolate! Then again, I will be starting my traditional no-chocolate resolutions from Jan 1st anyway, so it’s probably a good thing!

Build up to Christmas!

Meeting Santa Claus at Kai's pre-school

Winter Wonderland

It’s started! Having a little bit of trouble explaining how santa manages to be at the Brunel Centre, the pre-school and the gold club all withint eh space of a couple of horus, and why his beard keeps changing(!) but so far getting away with it!

In their posh clothes!

Yesterday (Saturday) was really busy as we had Kai’s school Christmas bazaar (pics above) then raced out to the golf club for a panto and visit from santa claus, followed by a GNO with the school-mums and me.

The golf club do was especially good. Our friends Jill and Alan were The Prince and Rumpelstiltskin in the panto, and Mia got up on stage and said “Konnichiwa”! The best bit was the visit from santa. The golf club is up on the Marlborough Downs, and at night you can’t see where the hills end and the sky starts because of the dark. Santa comes over the hill in his sleigh, all lit up and playing Christmas music and it really does look like he is flying in across the sky and coming in to land – the kids went absolutely wild!

I am having trouble loading up video at the moment, so I will keep working on it and hopefully have something up soon, x

Jackpot!

Today’s blog comes to you courtesy of South African Stellenbosch cabernet sauvignon-currently on my second glass!

So today was Shaw Ridge primary school’s Christmas bazaar and we won BIG on the raffle!  A bottle of wine, two boxes of chocolates, a box of assorted biccies AND we also won Guess the Weight of the Cake! (4lb 9oz!) so we pretty much cleaned up the place! Given that I had blown a tenner within about 5 minutes of walking through the doors it was only fair! Also found darling hubby’s Christmas present on the white elephant stall (a meerkat mousemat! Cool!). Given that yesterday I swore off all chocolate before Christmas, I think someone is trying to tell me something and who am I to argue with divine intervention?!

I was supposed to be helping on the childrens tombola from 4.30 to 5.00 (Brits among you will know what a tombola actually is!) but all the prizes had gone by 4.25! And the lord said “Nicky, put your feet up!” and Nicky saw that it was good! Again – divine intervention! 

In addition to all this, I picked up a Christmas tree at Homebase for less than half-price (and BIG thanks to the manager for driving all the way down to Bristol to get it for me when the internet mistakenly said they had one in stock in the North Swindon branch – great customer service!) and then in Comet – BIG news this – I picked up a new digital camera with £30 off!  So photos WILL follow again shortly once I have charged the battery!

All in all, this has been a great day, except for the fact that poor little Jay barfed up his bottle of milk at 5am, was running a temperature of 39 degrees by 10am, and was utterly miserable most of the morning, until I finally managed to get some calpol into him at lunchtime. He seems much better this evening.

In other news, mum bought the kids traditional Indian whistles on the white elephant stall – I am about to pull my own arm off, just so I have something to hit her with!

Kai is practising hard for his carol concert next week, and Mia is practising hard for her nativity play next week too! Mum and I both wish they wouldn’t, but what can we do?! “Welcome to your king, everybody sing, welcome to your king everybody sing, welcome to your welcome to your kiiii-iii-iii-iiing!”

Well, it’s time for dinner (not even 7pm yet and we have already cleared one box of chocolates so I guess dinner tonight will be box #2!) so I had best get off. Normal picutre AND video service will resume shortly!

Customer service gone mad!

Woke up this morning to find it was absolutely perishing! If my husband was a brass monkey, there would be no need for me to worry about anymore children!

It would seem in my absence from the UK in the last year that the whole country has been on a customer service course. At first glance this can only be a good thing, given that last time I was back I had a huge argument with a gum-chewing runt of a 16 year old who insisted I had given her a pound, not a fiver and refused to give me change until I threatened to call the police. Then on the way home the bus driver watched me put in £2 in the machine for a £1.50 ride and THEN told me they don’t give change.

Well, in the first few weeks of being home I was really impressed with everyones concern for what kind of morning I was having, but its getting a little bit – dare I say it? – “weird” now!

The other day I went to Argos to get Kai some Ben 10 curtains. When I went to the counter to pick them up the conversation went something like this:

“How are you today?….oh, (looking at my bruises) you’ve been in the wars!”

“No, actually, I’ve just had surgery on my face”

“Oh! Wow! Coooool! (he was about 17) What did you have done?”

“I had a nose job”

“Cool! Where did you have that done?”

“At the Ridgeway hospital”

“Oh, cool. Aren’t they great there? My ex girlfriend had surgery there. The NHS were useless, couldn’t find anything wrong with her. Turns out she had a cyst in her leg, and it abcessed right the way up into her groin. It hit her bowel. The pus was unbelievable! Her bowel was on the point of necrosis. she was in agony. It was really gross. She nearly died.”

“Okaaay, can I have my Ben 10 curtains now?”

Not what I was expecting from a trip into Argos although hearing about some complete strangers bowel necrosis did put a slight spring in my step I have to admit. It was also pretty fun on the way in when a guy on a promotion stand pounced on me:

“Excuse me madam, can you tell me who your current provider of energy is?”

“Sure, Tokyo Gas and Electric”

“Oh”

But it isn’t just customer service guys who seem intent on sharing their intimate details with you. I was in a garden centre the other week, watching a Christmas decoration (santa in a spitfire!) bobbing around with a guy next to me with a kid the same age as Kai. I said:

“You could have someone’s eye out with that!” He said “Yeah, or two black eyes!” and then  turned to look at me – “Oh, God! I’m SO sorry!”

I would have laughed if it hadn’t just been 5 days post-op and I was at risk of ripping my stitches and to be fair my face was a beautiful shade of purple, so I just said “oh, no worries, its nice to actually have someone make a joke of it, most people just put their heads down and pretend they’re not looking”.

He said “Yes, I know what you mean, when my 6 year old had a brain tumour and had chemotherapy and all his hair fell out, you could really see his surgery scars and everyone was so careful not to be seen to be “staring”.  

A terrible thing to have happened and my heart goes out to the poor lad and his family, but how the hell do you respond to that???! You have to say something, you can’t just walk away! So I said “Hows he doing now?” The answer: “He died”. Oh god. I am SO sorry. Erm, merry christmas.

I have walked into New Look and watched service staff behind the counter in a huddled group with their line manager “practicisng” their smiles which frankly was bloody scary! Every time I walk into Next now, someone pounces on me to check that I am having a fabulous day and whether I need a basket. It’s getting a little disconcerting!

On the bright side, I have done what I usually do and made a TON of impulse purchases only to take most of them back the next day, and that is “no problem whatsoever” so I suppose on balance all this caring and sharing is a good thing.

In other news: it had to happen and it finally has. It’s been threatening for weeks now, but last night there was a shriek from the bath (Mia and Kai) and I looked around just in time to see the digital camera floating back to the surface, with Jay standing at the edge of the bath, one hand hovering over the water and a fascinated look on his face (“oh! So that’s what happens when I throw the camera in the bath! Mummy goes absolutely postal!”) As it happens, Mums camera was on its last legs anyway, so we were going to get her a new one for Christmas. That has now been expedited as I can’t post any pics on this blog until we get a new one!

And finally – I thought the other days light dusting of snow was exciting, but this morning we woke up to a WHOLE 2 INCHES!!! Mia and I battled through a blizzard to get her into school this morning and I am SO glad for her that we made the effort – a snow-crazed frenzy of a party with 380 kids aged 5-11 is not something to be missed! They are not going to get a shred of work done at that school today, and quite honestly, any thoughts I might have had of going into teaching professionally melted faster than this snow is going to when I saw about 30 kids burst out of the door onto the school field like rabid monkeys being released from a cage! Pity the poor teachers this morning!

The last pic before the camera bought it!

More pics to be posted when I get a new camera! I miss you all right now!

Love Nicky x

Happy Birthday Jay!

Three Little Monkeys...

Jay on the swing in the park outside Mia’s school

Jay is 1 today! Unfortunately we haven’t done much as everyone is sick! But we are planning a bit of a party for him this weekend.

Mia had a play-date over at her Japanese friend Natsuho’s house today.

On our way to meet Mia from school

When I went to pick her up, the two of them, with Hana-chan, were tucking into yaki-soba! Emi Yamamoto (Natsuho’s mum) travels all over to find Japanese cooking ingredients. I felt sorry for her – she has exactly the same problem as me in reverse! 

It’s getting really cold here and we have been forecast snow in the next week. It is already falling in Scotland and the north east. As usual a little dusting has brought the entire country to a standstill, and there were news reports this morning on TV with pictures of people struggling through drifts that were 2cms high in places!

Mia's school from the back showing the outdoor classroom, with the school fields behind us.

Unfortunately I have had to give up my plans to volunteer in the school to teach ESL while I am here. It is maddening. They desperately need me. I am more than happy to help.  But in order to do so I have to get a letter from the Japanese police stating that I am not a danger to children! That can take 3 weeks to process, and it is just not going to be worth it for the 3 days I will actually have left to teach by the time I receive it. I get mad at the apparent lack of protection of children in Japan, but the UK seems to have gone to the opposite extreme.

On a brighter note I am LOVING the shopping! 2 bags of about 20 (each) mikan (satsuma) for about 280 yen!!! It is SO cheap here. Just wish I could find a decen pair of shoes but Swindon is just crap for that kind of thing. I think I am going to have to pay a special trip to Bristol or London.

Jay in his little bathrobe - he looks SO cute!

Mia is absolutely loving her school, getting on well with everyone and learning incrediblyfast. Every night she gives me a demo on the bathroom wall with her finger of what she can write in joined-up writing, and she now says “pardon?” not “what?”!

Kai has a little buddy called Brendan at school and is constantly either on the computer or running around in a firemans helmet. Jay is just loving all the attention from his Nana. I am coughing all the time which is driving me nuts, but my nose is healing fast! See the Septorhinoplasty section for some 10 day pics!

***Newsflash***

So – the kids have all been given their parts in the school nativity play today and Mia is……AN ANGEL !!! Anyone who knows her will get the irony of this!

I am SO happy for her because psychologically I have a big problem with school nativity plays and angels. Anyone from Copthorne Convent school in the 70’s will remember Mrs Sharman, the PE teacher from hell who was also in charge of drama, and who absolutely loathed me from my pudding bowl haircut down to my clarkes shoes for some inexplicable reason (couldn’t possibly be that I was a totally pretentious brat??!). The woman had red eyes and horns, and when she used to yell at us (me) even the clouds ran for cover.

I swear she deliberately not only never made me an angel because she knew it was what I wanted, she gave me the crappiest parts to play just because she was a vindictive witch. I have been a leaf, a tulip, a “girl from Austria”…but never an angel. So I am thrilled that my daughter has been made an angel, and I almost feel like I have laid a ghost to rest with this. Nothing like living your life through your children!

Mrs Sharman is probably no longer on her mortal coil right now, (someone probably shot her off it) but I hope she is looking down (or more likely up) on me and  my gorgeous angel daughter right now! Nya ha ha! I had to wait 30 years and live life vicariously through Mia but finally, finally you old witch, I get to be an angel!!!

In other (less bitter!) news – je vais a Paris avec mon mari! We have booked a little “getaway” (more like Great Escape!) for two days after Christmas! Why freeze your bollocks off in Swindon when you can freeze them off in Paris where they also do much better cafe au lait and pastries, that’s what I say. It’s supposed to be the “city of love”, but quite honestly in our case, well, especially MY case, it is going to be redesignated the “city of 8 hours kip without the children”!

My face continues to heal at quite a pace – I have gone from severely beaten-up to just beaten-up, to my latest “look” which I’ve named “does she have bruises or is that jaundice?” I have gone a really weird yellow col0ur. From days gone by I seem to remember some very yellowy bruises around the sites of broken bones, so this would make sense, but…well, there is a small but persistant voice inside me that keeps piping up that this could also be gangrene, and quite honestly NO nose is even worse than a bent nose!

Naturally we are already severely behind with the Japanese coursework Mia was supposed to be keeping up while we are in the UK, but we had a good crack at things tonight and we should be caught up soon.

We have now hooked back up with all our Japanese friends from when we were last here, playdates are being set up, and hopefully we will be bursting with kanji, grammar and attitude very soon. Read into that what you will!

On that note I am starving, there is a lovely bottle of chateau neuf du pape downstairs we picked up on special offer at Asda, we are having fresh pasta and garlic bread tonight, and I don’t have plans to snog anyone so I am going to stuff myself. Bon appetite, tout le monde!

PS: more pics to follow soon, I promise. We lost the camera for a few days but we have found it now!

What Japan calls a “Typhoon” we just call “November”!

The weather was pretty grotty today, and I slept late anyway after a rough night with Jay. Unfortunately I have no sense of smell and had no idea that he had poo’d the place down! Well, I say “slept late” – lets be more specific and say I “lay in bed trying to sleep whilst listening to the sounds of Mia and Kai tearing each other to pieces”!

We took the kids to Bonkers in the end. Bonkers is like a living hell for anyone with a noise endurance problem. A huge soft indoor play area for kids of all ages, where you can also get a cuppa and some cake. But unfortunately not G&T.

On the way in – through a beautiful garden centre – they were giving out free mince pies and mulled wine. LOVE being home! I booked the kids in to see Santa in his grotto on December 23rd (he’s making a quick stop on his way back to Lapland following his promotional tour of Europe – or so I told Mia!) and then we hit bonkers, where I was able to indulge in one of my favourite hobbies when home of “Japanese-fishing” which goes something like this:

1) Sit next to target and keep quiet for a few minutes

2) Suddenly shout out “Mia – abunai da yo! Nakayoku asobinasai! ki o tsukette ne!” or words to that effect

3) Enjoy shock on neighbours face from corner of eye

4) Practice Japanese ad-lib with target who ALWAYS then says something because it always blows their minds when a blondie in the UK comes out with a little nihongo. I mean lets face it, manyof us these days can barely even string a sentence together in English!

5) Bonus points accumulated if target is a hottie. Which so far they never are.  Not a patch on my hubby anyway (hi, darling! Figured you’d be reading this!)

The Christmas Decorations up for sale in the garden centre are really quite stunning this year, and I stopped to admire a little Santa in a Spitfire bobbing around in the air on a spring. I said to a guy nearby “That’d last about 5 seconds in my house” to which he replied “Yeah, or give everyone black eyes!” He then turned to look at me, clapped a hand over his mouth in horror and apologised profusely for any rudeness or reference to my bashed up face, while I stood doubled over, holding on to my bashed up face and trying not to rip out any stitches for laughing so hard! Poor guy! He was mortified!

Kai is at that point right now where he grabs anything and asks if we can buy it. Works pretty well in Bunkado around the candy counter, but today in the garden centre the sight of him dragging a huge bag of manure roughly the size of himself around the corner and calling over his shoulder ” Mummy! Can we buy this??!” was just too much to handle! I think I am just going to have to endure some long-term scarring from some ripped stitches and be done with it!

Open Night at School

Please check out the septorhinoplasty category for the latest update and pics on my new nose! Meanwhile….

Last night was open night for the parents at Mia’s school. I can’t believe how much work she has done already! Unlike Japan, where they are already learning by “drilling” pages and pages of Kanji and Maths, here they teach by picking a topic, studying it for a period of time, and linking the subjects into it.

Right now, they are studying Native American Indians, so for example, in art they make headdresses, dreamcatchers and model villages, in PE they do Indian dancing, in English they write essays about the Indians, and in ICT they use the computer to do research and design.

A local sculptor made them an actual totem pole!

 

..which they then drew pictures of. This is Mia's

 

She made a Dreamcatcher...

 

...which they hung up in the class...

 

Indian bead necklaces

 

Indian headdresses, including one for the chief that they all worked on together

 

They even have a teepee set up in the classroom!

 

And just LOOK what I found in the library!!!

 

It looks like all the work we have been doing in her Maths is paying off too!

 

I am just so proud of her! In the last 18 months she has gone from dai-ichi yochien, to Shaw Ridge, to Tsukishima yochien, to Tsukuda shogakko, to Toyosu Kita shogakko, back to Shaw Ridge and soon back to Toyosu Kita again. She’s 6! And yet, wherever she goes, she just walks right in and gets on with it.

When I have walked her home from school all this week, she has turned to me every day and said “You know what Mummy, every body is just sooooo nice here”. I am SO pleased this is working out, and eternally grateful to Shaw Ridge school for letting us upset their system like this.

When I walk through the school to pick her up I wave and say hello left right and centre too. I’ve made many amazing friends here as well. I feel like we really have the best of both worlds now, and the kids are getting their doses of Japanese discipline, and English creativity which is just so important to balance everything out for them.  We are very lucky!

We’ve been here 4 weeks now! I can’t believe it! Halloween – done. Bonfire night – tick. GNO’s – ongoing project. Nose-job – check. Next stop, Advent, Christmas, Paris, New Year and then back to Japan. What a great life!

First day of school!

Well, the fairy thing worked out in the end, thank god!

She wrote a letter asking the fairy if she could leave 50p and a pair of wings, and “Silvermist” (always fancied myself as a dark, exotic fairy!) wrote back and explained that humans are not allowed to fly because they are too big, but here is a pound and a secret – is she makes a wish and goes to sleep, she can fly in her dreams!

In addition – as luck would have it – we went to a garden centre yesterday with a little craft village and in the middle of the craft village was – A FAIRY SHOP!!!! Perfect! So I nabbed a pair of wings, and “Silvermist” left them for her hidden behind the curtain so when she opened the curtains in the morning, there they were! One happy little 6 year old!

All this has coincided with her first day of school – see attached. So while I am a little worried she is going to go up to class full of stories of fairies coming in the night and

First day at school!

leaving her with wings and having everyone think she’s a looper, at least she’ll have something to say! She actually went in no trouble at all, and Mrs-Edwards-The-Fabulous was there to bring her in and introduce her to the class – which this year is “Aspen”. So things are looking good.

On that note I now have to leave for hospital! REALLY nervous and still not sure if they will even do the op as I am still a bit coughy – but we shall see!

See you all on the other side in the world of straight noses!

Nicky xxx