Back to Japan

Ok, ....we have been here in Japan for just over 4 months now, and this blog has been sitting here..... so empty.....so lonely, so sad, for just as long. My "B" blogger icon has been just waiting forever to be clicked.

Sorry it has taken so long to get anything posted, but by the end of the night, there are times when I can barely string a sentence together let alone write anything remotely interesting.

So here we are again, back in Japan.
I have wondered, several times, since we moved here ..... why I again signed up for this madness.

Will somebody please tell me???

For those of you who didn't know, we lived here for approximately 2 years back in 1992-1994

The first 2 months were pretty much " what have I done..... how do I get out of this with the least amount of pain"? type of attitude.
Where do I even begin with all the 'fun stuff'?? Well first of all, having a 1- year old no matter where you live is not easy. Put that together with transporting your whole family to a really different culture on the other side of the planet and what do you get?

A gigantic wine bill.

So we live in a quiet and quaint neighborhood in Setagaya-ku, about 20 minutes outside of Tokyo. A very pleasant area, located conveniently between 2 train stations. We live in a 2 story home, 4-house compound, (not typical in our neighborhood, it is pretty much for foreigners--and more than likely viewed by the Japanese as 'mansions'.) We have 3 German neighbors, one family French/German. All have kids of varying ages, that have quickly made friends with ours. All very lovely people, very helpful, and I am picking up a bit of German.

Our kids, Celia, 13, Joseph 10, and Kevin, 6 attend private, international Catholic schools. All-boy, all-girl, uniforms-- the whole bit. It is quite different from the public schools, back in Golden Colorado, as they have religion and Japanese classes. They even attend 'mass'. This photo here is of a yard down the street in our neighborhood.


They have all adjusted quite well, despite the major upheaval. Joseph was especially excited, to my surprise, about wearing a tie and blazer to school, as he could "dress like James Bond everyday." So the first few weeks were quite frustrating in the mornings, getting all those buttons, (some of them popping across the room in anger...) figuring the tie, dressing like you are going to Sunday school every morning, but they have pretty much now got it down.

We were all plagued with the season-changing illnesses as we arrived, on November 1. Flu stuff going around, then around again. And again. So just when the kids were getting used to the new schools and catching up on the curriculum, they'd fall behind another week.
Ok, so we got through that and no talk of divorce.














Ira here...Don't know what Katrina's talking about. It's all been going so smoothly...