Surprise

Yep. I've tried to dance around it for a while now, but the plain fact is, I'm finding it hard to blog because the morning sickness and food and smell aversions have knocked me off my game. I was stunned to see a positive pregnancy test a few weeks ago, but it was in a "how could we possibly be that lucky?????" kind of way. Here we thought that the second go around could easily take another year or more, but nope. I'm apparently one of those wacky and lucky few who never get a period while breastfeeding and still manage to get pregnant again. I suppose I have some "survivor's guilt" about that. I lamented our previous experience for so long that I really felt those of us waiting for baby #2 were all in the same boat. Only I'm not; and that feels weird to me. I think I'm beginning to adjust to the fact that this is happening. Who knows what time will bring. I'm not due until June and I'm still several weeks away from the end of the 1st trimester, but for right now, this is real and it's an amazing gift.

Amidst all of our celebrating, we're still trying to get our house prepped for a rental. Did I mention we may have found renters? Some friends of friends need a place to stay for a few months during a renovation on their house and the timing coincides quite well with our excursion to the East Coast and then on to Japan. Doing all of the cleaning, prepping, packing, storing, etc. with the occasional bout of nausea has been a challenge. Right now, I'm just trying not to be overly ambitious.

For now, I'm hanging in there and have my eyes on the prize: I'm hoping that the nausea will have seriously subsided by the time Thanksgiving rolls around. This is my year for turkey, gravy and mashed potatoes!!

Halloween 2009

This past weekend was our first celebration of Halloween "American-style." It was perhaps even more exciting for me than it was for my daughter. Where I grew up, in upstate New York, we could pretty much count on freezing cold weather and occasionally snow for Halloween. This made trick-or-treating somewhat less enjoyable because in order to be warm, you often had to sacrifice the cool looking effects of your costume. This year, the temperature was a lovely and mild almost 60 degrees. We dressed up Peanut in her costume and headed off to a local trick-or-treating event. We met up with some friends and their toddler. The kids got a few pieces of hard candy and then wanted to head outside away from the crowds. They sat down (outdoors - with no coats!) and nibbled on their hard candy. Then we walked up and down the street where other local businesses were all handing out goodies. The kids even got to share a free gelato. How cool is that? We were able to enjoy ice cream, outdoors on Halloween!

Afterwards, we headed across the street to a great little izakaya for some korokkes for the kiddos and lots of great tempura, kushikatsu, and yakitori. They also served French fries with wasabi mayonnaise; this is my new favorite dish!

Last year we weren't able to really celebrate Halloween in the same way, since we were in Japan. This year, we had both an American style celebration and great Japanese food too. Who says you can't have it all??

And now, the gratuitous cute kid pic:

Back in the Saddle

I'm trying to get back into the swing of things here at home (Seattle) after our trip to Raleigh, while simultaneously preparing to go on the road again. In another couple of weeks we're off to the East Coast to visit my parents for the holidays and from there it's on to Japan again. I can't begin to describe how happy I am to be spending Thanksgiving AND Christmas with my folks. I will be very thankful this year!

In the meantime we're in the midst of chaos once again. But I'm sure you can imagine what that's like. Rather than cover all that now, I thought I'd mention how weird and surreal it was to be looking in on the lives of my sister and brother-in-law and their new baby. Baby G was just about 2.5 months old when we visited and your average happy-go-lucky baby. What I had forgotten or blocked out I suppose, was how steep the learning curve can be as a new parent. I can't remember the last time I saw such stressed out parents. And then it occurred to me that maybe I had and just couldn't remember it! I have no idea how we looked to outsiders. Most of our friends have kids close in age to Peanut, so when I saw them with newborns, we were all frazzled and sleep-deprived and learning as fast as we could.

I wished on multiple occasions that I could have taken the baby from my sister and offered to make it better. But new parents have to learn in their own time and their own way.

I wished on multiple occasions that I could make them more comfortable with having us (and our toddler) stay in the house with them. Especially so that they wouldn't have to be so worried about all damage she might do to herself since that is just as much my job as Peanut's parent as it is their job as host/ess. But again, they're not used to being around toddlers and need more time and exposure to be comfortable with the everyday antics of a toddler.

I worried that I wasn't parenting as well as I should or could. Their level of concern about my child's behavior was much more intense than my own level of concern and I don't know if it's because I'm too "hands-off" and therefore negligent in some way (or maybe I'm just a bad guest?). Or maybe it's truly just a difference in parenting styles (or to be fair maybe they were just far too overwhelmed to be hosting us and dealing with a newborn and the whole situation just created more anxiety for them).

All in all, my head was sort of spinning after our trip. I kept trying to look back at my own experience nearly 1 1/2 years ago to see what I would have looked like to an outsider. But of course that's never really possible. I just keep thinking that there's a valuable lesson to be learned from our trip but I'm unable to see it yet.

Cold in NC

That's right- it's cold in North Carolina! We're enjoying some quality time with my sister and her husband and the new baby, but it's hard to find time to post updates since one or the other of our kids always seems to be awake and finding the time to post then feels nearly impossible. I now understand the joys of having one child with set naptimes! The jet lag has been surprisingly difficult to deal with (I figured the 3 hour difference would be negligible compared to the 16 from Japan!) in part because we are currently sharing a room with Peanut which we don't generally do at home and she's very sensitive to hearing us move around - which leads to more night wakings I'm sure.

The trip has been trippy since I feel like perhaps I'm getting a glimpse of what I looked like with a newborn. My sister is definitely frazzled which I find humorous since her son sleeps really well (i.e. 5 hour stretches at night and he's just about 3 months old!) and he's a very good-natured boy. Peanut was always good-natured but not a "good" sleeper per se. For us, 3 hours at a time was generally our standard of good! As a result, I find it hard to believe that my sister is fretting over a 2 hour crying fit when her son wasn't quite ready to go to sleep one night. I don't remember how often, if ever, that happened when Peanut was 3 months old, but I know it took us longer than their usual 5-10 minutes to get our baby to sleep. Wow. How dreamy that sounds.

Ultimately what this trip has done has give me a new perspective about my relationship with my sister. But that's more for another day.

Fixer-uppers

We're up to our eyeballs in mini home-improvement projects as we try to get our house ready to rent out when we head out "on the road" so to speak in another month and a half. Before that, we're making a quick trip to NC to see my sister and my newest nephew. I'm looking forward to spending some quality sister time together and having a mini vacation which means I don't have to fix anything.

Our home didn't start out as a fixer-upper, but after living here for a number of years, things are naturally starting to break down or wear out and we've put off many of the repairs for a while. Now seems like the perfect time to tackle many of these projects and I'm feeling accomplished because we're getting them done. But I also feel like we're still behind the 8 ball and I'm not sure we'll have it all done by the time we leave. ..

Oceans Apart, (Day after Day)*

Living across the world from where I was just a few months ago I occasionally feel a sense of displacement. On the one hand I feel very grounded and rooted in my life here, but on the other, I can't shake the sense that something is missing. I was recently reminded that it's time for the rice harvest. This means that it's been almost a year since we left for Japan to help my father-in-law with the rice harvest. I can't believe it! We won't be there for the harvest this year, and as a result I have that sense of displacement, "How could I almost forget?!" Likewise, I keep thinking, "Is it almost time for the olives yet?" It's too early but I can't wait until we hear from my mother-in-law that they're ready to be picked.

In that vein of thinking about how we integrate our cross-cultural partners and lives, I've been reading some interesting articles in the paper lately and wonder if you've seen these stories? The first story is about a pair who has been living in the U.S. for several years and would like to stay in New Hampshire operating their authentic French bakery but the U.S. government assessed the bakery and its profits as marginal and therefore made the lady's application for an extension on her work/investor's visa ineligible . The people of the town essentially lobbied the State Department - writing letters etc. saying that this small business was more than "marginal" to their community. I found it touching and think I'd do the same. How wonderful would it be to have an authentic French bakery in your little community and why would you want to chase that away?

The second story is about a newly married couple right here in the Pacific Northwest, he's American and she's Canadian and they're currently unable to live together in one country.

What I find most frustrating about both stories is that there's such a tangle of legal....stuff. The boundaries that exist among nations are often arbitrary, although in some cases there are natural geographic constructs (like rivers, mountains, etc.) that act as dividers. It just seems like all of these problems could be easily avoided or resolved if we didn't have these rules. Naturally it's easy for me to say all this, and I'm clearly biased as all of this legal stuff occasionally makes things challenging for my husband and I and especially my daughter who, as things stand right now, will be forced to choose between her Japanese and American citizenship statuses once she is 22 years old.

Having said all of this, I should also emphasize that I'm in no hurry to give up my American citizenship. While that might simplify things in some ways (if my husband and daughter and I were all Japanese citizens) I just can't wrap my head around revoking a status that really feels like a part of my identity. In other words, it's not just that I'd choose not to be Japanese, I don't think I'd feel able to adopt the citizenship of any other nation either. Maybe there really is something to the notion of national identity and boundaries after all?

If you had to revoke your citizenship in order to become a citizen of another country would you (i.e. no dual citizenship allowed)? What if that was the only way for you to be with your partner/spouse?

*Yes I was a Richard Marx fan once upon a time. Don't mock.

Cry Me a Puddle

Anthropologa has this post about crying and how one survey of women revealed that we cry an average of 2.24 hours per week. Whoa. Sounds like an awful lot to me.

Yet, I'm pretty free with the tears. I just need to see someone else crying and that's enough to set me off. Lately, I'm feeling like I'm on the verge of tears even more often. I'm convinced it has to do with the wacky hormones. I feel this...imbalance. And since I can't write anything else here without feeling like I'm *always* writing about how badly I want Baby #2, etc. I'm going to do some posting at my old blog on occasion. Because clearly, I need the outlet.