New/old Osaka home

After much travelling around, we are finally settled in a new home for the next seven months! It is going to be the longest Elliott has ever lived anywhere, so I am really excited to start new routines with him.

We have had an eventful couple of months. We stayed with Elliott's grandparents in Calgary for two weeks and went to a wedding:



Elliott was too noisy to attend the ceremony, but he had a great time at the reception and even went out on the dance floor with Mummy and Daddy!

After Calgary we headed off to Hawaii, where Elliott learned to crawl during our two weeks there:



After Hawaii we came to Japan, but had to stay in a temporary apartment while we waited for our proper one to be ready. Elliott got to visit my old university campus daily. It was such a strange feeling to have him visit the International Students' Centre with me!



Then on Monday we arrived at our lovely new room:



Our new room feels like the complete opposite of our room in the Reversible Destiny Lofts. It's much smaller, which I think will make it very easy to keep warm in winter. It's also very linear!!! Now that I stay home with Elliott every day, I think the biggest difference that I will appreciate is that there are no uneven surfaces for him to fall down on, and I will be able to wipe the hardwood floors sparkling clean after every messy meal he has. I do miss our loft though. I often wonder what it would be like if Elliott had learned to crawl in our Reversible Destiny Loft!

And after a fun day out at the Expo Park yesterday I ventured out today to find the supermarket:



1. The hill right outside our apartment
2. Heading through the neighbourhood halfway down the hill (I was trying a shortcut)
3. More walking downhill... This was when I could see the supermarket in the distance!
4. Even more walking downhill... We were almost there!

Needless to say, it was a lot of walking UPhill on the way home :-D The last time I lived in this area I was the healthiest I've ever been from all the biking and walking I did up and down these hills. I'm sort of hoping all the walking to the supermarket I'll do in the next 7 months will make me look like I did a decade ago :-P

Baby angst

Elliott is seven months old now, and is slowing turning into a little boy before our eyes. He sits easily without my help now, and although he still hates tummy time he will surprise me by rolling onto his tummy and eating the corners of his play mats if I leave the room for a few minutes. He is not interested in crawling, but laughs and smiles if we let him hold our hands and "walk" on our feet, or hold onto the couch to stand up. I have a feeling he wants to skip the crawling stage and go straight to walking! This is probably because most of the babies are quite a bit older than him at his baby play group, so he sees other babies doing amazing things like push a doll pram and he wants to try it too!

It's summer in Toronto right now, and I spend a lot of my day outside meeting new mum friends in the playground outside our building. This afternoon the playground was deserted except for three boys who were about 11 or 12 years old. I had a new ball for Elliott to play with, but once he saw the older boys running around with water guns he refused to play boring old ball games with me! He spent half an hour staring longingly at the water fight going on around him.

Eventually the boys realised Elliott wanted to join them, and they came over to play with him! Growing up I was surrounded by girl cousins, and the few boy cousins we had were usually dragged into our girly games. I'm not really sure what boys get up to when they're on their own and I was not sure what to expect from the big boys this afternoon. They were just lovely though. One said "Aww! He's so cute!" and asked me lots of questions about Elliott. Then they all joined Elliott on his blanket and started playing with him! It was quite rough play, but when Elliott looked over at me and saw me smiling his concerned face disappeared and he started giggling at the boys. It was so heartwarming!

I had to physically resist trying to grab Elliott back when the boys threw him in the air, tried to make Elliott walk, and let him fall on his back when he couldn't walk. I kept saying to myself "If he had lots of older cousins or siblings, this is what would happen all the time". Elliott's look of pure joy that the boys had finally noticed him let me know I had made the right choice to leave him to play. It also made me realise that Elliott puts his complete trust in everyone he meets, and I felt such an overwhelming need to protect that trust at all costs. I never want him to be hurt, and I certainly never want his little heart to be broken. (Or his little arms and legs, if I'm completely honest!) My love for this little boy grows exponentially every day ♥

Baby led weaning

The day before Elliott's six month birthday I went out and bought a highchair from Ikea and was super excited to start solid food with him. I had read a book called Baby-led Weaning by Gill Rapley and had bought banana and avocado for Elliott to try for breakfast.

Elliott's first BLW experience was underwhelming... He didn't try to grab the food, and he certainly didn't demolish it like the babies I'd seen on YouTube did. After nine days of him crying after we put him in the highchair I was starting to think we may as well give up BLW and do conventional purees. I even bought a jar of organic pureed peas at the supermarket last night.

This evening I had a breakthrough though. Rather than feed Elliott the peas on a spoon I thought he might like to paint his highchair with them. He did! He loved it! There were peas EVERYWHERE and he had so much fun that when I put half a banana into the mix he picked that up and tried to nom it. Yay!

So I am back on the baby-led weaning bandwagon. Now to find more foods Elliott can paint with! (^o^)

Riverdale Farm

Now that it's summer in Toronto I am trying to take Elliott out and explore the city more. Today I meant to take a quick walk, and ended up trekking all the way to Riverdale Farm and back! Riverdale Farm is not a working farm, it's just a place where city kids can learn what a donkey looks like :-D

Elliott loved being at the farm! He especially loves looking at leaves blowing in the wind when he looks up at trees. He seemed to really enjoy meeting the goats today, too.



It's amazing to me how expressive babies become at six months old!

Farewell Japan

I left this blog in somewhat of a hurry after the earthquake on March 11th. It was unsafe to drink the water in Tokyo if you were a nursing mother and my husband was being called back to his university in Toronto, so we rushed to buy tickets home early and said goodbye to Japan about a week after the earthquake happened.

I have wondered if our time in the super-stimulating loft might have hurried Elliott's development along. There is a mum in my apartment building in Toronto who has a baby girl with the same birthday as our baby. We go to the same play group, so I am able to compare them. Elliott started sitting up unassisted and rolled from front to back at 5.5 months, but the baby girl was doing it earlier. Elliott is reasonably happy to sit up for long periods of time, but he flops to the floor when he gets tired. The baby girl is completely comfortable sitting, and has even started trying to crawl! All before six months old. From this I conclude that both our babies are doing things a bit early, but that girls do things faster than boys. (Although there's another baby girl a week older than Elliott at play group who doesn't know how to sit up by herself yet)

You can see from all this that mothers are pretty competitive!!

Here is a picture of Elliott sitting up nice and straight in a Dragonball suit we bought for him in Japan:

Aftershocks

Grant took a video during the first big aftershock. We have the news on TV in the background, and he was on Skype to his mum. In some ways I'm glad we don't have big shelves, because the earthquake was very silent in our apartment. Nothing but the windows rattled.







I thought this might interest my Room 3 readers! Japanese kids have these hoods under their chairs at school in case of emergency. They have to put them on to go home when an earthquake hits, to keep their heads safe from falling debris.

Earthquake(s)

On Friday afternoon, March 11th there was a huge earthquake in northern Japan. Thankfully we were very far from the epicentre, but the earthquake felt strong enough to make me want to sit down with Elliott in the Beco.

Grant and I were visiting the front office with Elliott when the earthquake struck. Since there are no shelves in the lofts, the office staff have their wine glasses hanging from a rack over the kitchen. We all ran out of the office onto the street as the glasses started smashing! Elliott was awake in the office, but soon after we ran onto the street he fell asleep in the Beco. My guess is he was soothed by the rocking motion!

After everything had calmed down, we went back up to our loft to see if everything was all right. The water in a pot we had left on the stove had splashed out, which makes sense because the earthquake felt like the ground was shaking up and down, not side to side. Some of our things had fallen off a stool and off the bathroom sink:





But nothing was broken so we were really lucky. As we were looking around our apartment for damage an equally large aftershock hit. It was eery seeing all our belongings swing back and forth from the ceiling! I wonder if Arakawa + Gins had considered earthquakes when they designed the lofts. From experience, it seems quite silly to have things hanging from the ceiling in an earthquake-prone country... We used to have our clothes hanging from bars in the square room, but I asked Grant to move them to a wire in the bathroom instead. It was too scary having our clothes rock back and forth over my head as I lay awake during aftershocks!!

Grant recently interviewed the architect who helped design the lofts, and he said that the lofts are made of such dense concrete that they are really strong against earthquakes. The windows were shaking during the two we were in, so I can't imagine how scary it must have been for people in regular apartments!

After the aftershock subsided Grant and I went across the road to McDonald's to get some late lunch. When we walked in there were only two other customers, which is very unusual for our location. When we went up to order, we were told that the gas had been shut off and we could only order drinks and desserts. We got a coffee each and sat down, and soon after that people started pouring in as usual. They opened the grills and we got our lunch!

We were sitting next to two junior high school kids in McDonald's, and I thought it was interesting that they were watching the news on TV with their cell phone. A sign of the times!



On the way home from McDonald's I noticed there was a LOT more traffic than usual. I didn't know then, but all the trains in Tokyo had been stopped and people had to stay overnight at their offices. I think there was more traffic than usual as people went to pick up their family members from work.



Although trains weren't running, busses were. There was an amazing line-up for the bus outside our loft well into the night. This usually never happens!



We spent a lot of time in front of the TV. I think Elliott picked up on the gravity of the situation, because he was up in the middle of the night for about an hour trying to tell us what he thought about it!



There were lots of aftershocks all of last night and today, and we just felt the earthquake up in Fukushima before I started writing this. Elliott didn't nap from 2pm until 10pm, and had a huge crying spell just before the TV announced the Fukushima earthquake was about to start. (How do they know the earthquake is going to happen before it does, I wonder...?) I wonder if babies are like dogs, they can predict when an earthquake is about to happen :-P

Just so you know we're all safe and sound, here is a photo of our loft right after the big earthquake happened on Friday: