let's hear about the boy!

Just realized that I didn't say much about the little guy in my last post. He is getting used to a new school, too. He is now in kindergarten. I think he likes it. He doesn't say that he doesn't want to go nearly ass much as he used to when he was in daycare. I think it's because of a couple of things-age-he's able to make friends and play with other people more now, and also because of the time he is there. His grandmother goes to get him around 2:00 instead of 4:30, so he spends less time there. When he comes home he usually plays around here or goes to a friend's house to play. I think he really enjoys this.

What is catching up with him, though, is the amount of sleep that he's getting. No longer taking naps (woo hoo!) he gets tired earlier but doesn't always get to bed early enough, usually resulting a minor meltdown on same of these days. Which usually means with me. He is fine til I get home and then it's time to eat and boom, that's it. He's tired and needs to be held and fed and he has fallen asleep this way many times. We're all still adjusting.

Here are a couple pics of him with his special Children's Day stuff that his grandmother set up for him.

That's really it for now. I'll update again when I can.
PS Don't know why he's making funny faces!

as promised

mutter mutter I am not having the easiest time with blogger at the moment and it's making me want to quit. I lost some stuff already.

My new job-I like it but I'm still not used to it totally. I haven't had a full week of teaching yet. The first week the grade 9s had to take a standardised test so they didn't have any classes that day. athe following week we went for a hike. Here are some pics from it (this wasn't the way I wanted to show these pics grumble grumble)

This is in a bamboo forest. It was one of the hardest parts of the trail. This is looking up.
This is looking down.
This is one of the many sets of stairs.
Actually steeper than they look.

Then the following week, we went for a 15 km hike to Hakone. It was good, I'm glad I went. The hike/walk was organised well. We were all in groups and the leaving times were staggered. There were check-in points, and our groups all had to be together to check in. Some groups thought that it was a race, so they were running. The 15 kms didn't wear me out, but there were parts of the trail that were a very steep walk uphill, and the ground was very uneven to walk on. At one point in particular I thought ok, I just can't do this any more. But I couldn't go back and I couldn't wait so I just kept going. We saw one sign that said 3.4 kms to Hakone and then we went up on the hardest part, took a little break, and then walked up more. The next sign we saw said 3 kms to Hakone and we were all just so surprised that we had only walked 400m!

Then there were the scary stairs-the ones that were really steep going down-no real place to step and a little slippery, too!


We had a little wait at the end of the hike to get on a ship that took us around the lake there-Lake Ashinoko. These pics were from the ship.


It was a good day and I didn't end up being too sore from all that walking, surprisingly. My group did the hike in (I think) 2 hrs and 48 mins. They were the fastest grade 8 group.

The following week, Monday, Thurs and Friday was a holiday. (Golden Week-I love holidays!)
Tomorrow is the beginning of the first whole week of school and I am a little worried because

My poor feet. The black toe on the right foot is from the hike last week, doesn't really hurt now. But Friday we went to Yokohama and I was walking down the stairs to the subway my cell phone rang. I went to answer it and wasn't looking and ended up going down 2 stairs to the bottom and sprained my ankle. F*ckin hurt, too! I now know why cartoons show little white stars flying around someone's head when they get hurt, that's what I was seeing. But I had to go get the little guy from his daddy's office. Then we had to get some food and drinks. Then I could put my foot up and ice it.

The plan was to stay in Yokohama for the weekend and go out here and there and meet some friends but we came back here on Fri night. By the end of the day on Fri I couldn't walk on my foot at all, I was thinking that maybe I actually broke something. Yesterday after sleeping a lot at night and spending most of my day lying/sitting around, I could put some weight on my foot. Today it still hurts but not as much as before and I've got compresses and a special supporter put on my foot (Fortunately(?) I've done this before and had these lying around.) Anyway, it will be hard to stand up for a good half of the day, I think. This next week is also a week when I have privates every night. Hopefully it won't be too bad.

Well I think that's it for now. Not much more to update. ;)