See these????!!!!!!  Once again….the great SOUL, my best blogger bud, has done it and sent me these FAB prezzies….just because she WANTED to and with no particular reason! I came home from work on Friday and this box was sitting on the desk (unopened) waiting for me.

Pics are kind of tiny,but you can see lots of GOODIES.

Here is Coffee all excited and wanting to POSE next to the goodies.

This was especially for Coffee. A little turtle. She LOVES it. She asked who gave it to her and I said…”you know the lady in the ‘puter that’s always catching fish for you and talking to them”! LOL

The animal in front, the Texas armadillo. Even Papa Bean and Coffee knew what it was! These animals are not indigenous to Japan, so I asked them, “Do you know what this is?” They both go, “armadillo”!

Last, but not least….a GREEN GECKO!….Kind of an private joke between us, but she’s my pink Gecko Sis and I’m her Green Gecko sis…  LOL…cool eh?

Again…..THANKS Soul! You really do ROCK!

PS…Feel free to look at my Japan Pix link from time to time. I’ll be adding pics occasionally!

Ha…Just wondering if the title would catch your attention. Right now…am having back-to-work hangover. It was SO hard to get back to work yesterday after such a LOOOONG holiday! I felt my brain shut down at about 4PM…but I struggled to finish that day’s work.

Just a note to let you know…check out my link: All Things JAPAN Pix for my latest picture blog! It’s a new template by wordpress that allows you to post one pic a page, and the surrounding colors change to match the prominent color in the photo! It is pretty wild and makes all the photos look awesome! To shuffle, just click on the arrows at the bottom…a kind of grandiose Flickr, if you will. Tell me what you think! Kind of tired and busy at work at the moment. I’ll do more writing during the weekend…which is coming soon! (The good thing about going back to work on a Wednesday is that it is ALREADY TGIF tomorrow!) Yessssss! See you all later!

Monday was quite a drizzly, dreary day. The temperature dropped at least 6 degrees from the day before…Gramma Bean had already left at 7:30 for the memorial ceremony for her sister-in-law with Uncle Bean and Papa Bean was getting ready to go for his “wedding of the day”. I was nearly at wits end at what to do with Coffee when my good friend Karen calls me up. She’s also an ex-pat (from the US), living in the same town with her Japanese husband, son and daughter.

She goes, “J…is so wishy-washy, he had wanted a free day to himself, but now he wants to go see a movie in town….so I asked him if he would still see the movie if Coffee went with him….” So, I ask Coffee, who is sprawled on the floor watching some DVD on TV, where she has been glued for the last 45 minutes. “Yes..Yes…I wanna watch a movie”…she gives her ok. Actually, I have never taken Coffee to an actual movie theater to see a movie, especially knowing that the movies she’ll want to watch are Japanese animation movies and I don’t think I could cope for 1 1/2 hours or more cooped up inside a movie theater watching something that I really didn’t want to watch in the first place! (I know…I’m such a bad mom!)

Papa Bean agrees that it is a good idea…and suddenly in a flurry…I hurry to get the laundry done and other stuff before we leave. We agree to go to the 14:50 movie so that we can get some lunch into the kids first. Karen’s oldest daughter E has soccer practice… and she’s a high schooler..so I am sure that the LAST thing she’ll want to do is spend time with a bunch of old ladies (her mom & I) and her younger brother and a little 1st grader…LOL! 

We meet up outside our usual meeting spot in town at noon. Her son J announces that he wants to go to Mos Burger (a Japanese version of Micky D’s but actually a lot yummier….). That’s cool. I have plans to cook curry that night so I don’t want to go anywhere where Coffee will end up ordering curry…then she’ll be stuck eating curry all day! Karen and J order a spicy teriyaki burger with french fries and onion rings….I order a lettuce and tomato burger with thousand island dressing…. with the onion rings and fries…and Coffee has a hot dog with fries. Obviously being a burger joint…we finish in under thirty minutes…so we are left with more than two hours until the start of the movie. The 5th was “kodomo-no-hi” (pronounced koe doe moe no he) in Japan, which literally is Children’s Day… and being a rather drizzly day…I think EVERYONE ELSE also thought the movies were a good idea! There was a line from the ticket counter all the way out and around the building! So anyways..we go off to a bookstore to kill some time. J gets two comic books, “manga” (man gah) in Japanese and then we decide to line up for tickets first, then go to Ciccio’s, an Italian coffee deli right across from the theater to get us a cappuccino and the kids some ice cream.

 (This is Karen’s son J and Coffee looking at comic books at the deli, killing time before the movie. Coffee borrowed on of J’s books that he had just bought.) (Pic courtesy of Karen)

Finally, 14:40 rolls around…and we give the kids the tickets and they go into the theater. Karen and I browse through a few stores then head off to where else???? Starbucks….! to drink more coffee and chat while waiting for the movie to finish…which by the way was a 2 hour movie!!!!

It finishes at 16:50, and we separate paths…. Coffee and I go home…where Papa Bean has beaten us…he is making the curry for dinner. On the way home I get a call on my cell from Uncle Bean…he and Gramma Bean are just in the next town on the expressway and will be home around 18:00.

He drops Gramma Bean off at home and heads to his home directly as he has work the next day. We have our dinner and while eating, Coffee relays all the details of the movie and the happenings inside the movie theater to us. In all, it was a very good Children’s Day indeed!

Two days and counting till it’s back to the grindstone for everyone in the Beanie Weanie family…well all except for Gramma Bean I guess…she’s on “permanent” vacation! LOL.

Today was an extremely hot day. It got up to the lower 80’s…or at least it felt like it. We had a nice slow morning. At about 7:30 AM, Coffee came from her bedroom to ours…with a smile on her face…saying that she thought we were all awake..but we were all still in dreamland. She seems to have gotten used to sleeping in her own bed..and didn’t seem to mind that she woke up alone! She gets up early on Sundays because she wants to watch Puri-Kure and Ge-Ge-Ge no Kitaro which run consecutively from 8:30 to 9:30…. So she plops down on the bed to watch TV in our room. We get satellite TV so Coffee watches the Disney channel to kill time. (No TV in Baby Bean’s room…) On weekdays..it’s like waking up the dead…what gives with that?

Papa and Mama go downstairs to breakfast. In our family…it’s all just coffee and toast…a self-service type of thing. Whoever gets up first has to make the coffee…and the toast is do-it-yourself. Thank God I don’t live in a family that has to have a “traditional” Japanese breakfast of rice, miso soup and fish! It is enough hassle just to get the coffee (the real coffee) on! And other than when staying at a fancy ryo-kan…I can’t imagine having fish for breakfast…but neither can anyone else in the Beanie Weanie family. Some families around us have the Japanese breakfast..and in the summer when it’s hot and all the windows are open…it smells up something pretty awful! Gramma Bean was a working mom..so she can’t see the hassle of actually making rice, fish and miso soup at 5:30 in the morning!

Soon after, Gramma Bean gets up…after staring at the TV for about half an hour. She is quite hard of hearing…in fact being unable to hear anything without the use of hearing aids in both ears. But in the mornings…she watches her fancy Sharp Aquos TV without the aids…I guess it must be like watching everything in “Mute”.

After the “necessary” programs are watched…. Coffee also comes down to her breakfast of jello, yogurt and hot chocolate..or I should say hot milk with Milo added to it. Some days she might have toasted ham sandwich or toast with a little bit of sugar on it. We usually try to make her have toast on school days because she has such a long walk and she’ll need the stamina for the walk and to last until lunch.

Papa starts to get ready as he has a wedding to shoot. Yep…he’s a wedding photographer on the weekends and works at the local hotel in town. Sometimes he has a business “trip” and shoots weddings at the major hotels in Tokyo or Nagoya. Gramma Bean has a memorial service for her sister-in-law who passed away 3 years ago. They have special service every odd year… so for that…she has to get some sweets to take along to give to the family…and she has to get her hair done…and before all THAT…she has to go to the bank to withdraw some money. So after Coffee plays with the neighbor kids for the entire morning… I drag her out of the neighbor’s house and we play chauffeur to Gramma Bean so she can get all her errands done. We drop her off at the hair salon (she can get home on her own…) and we go through the drive-thru at Micky D’s as it is now lunch time. Coffee gets her Happy Meal and the toy of the week.  At least it’s not an obnoxious sounding toy like the one from “The Bee” movie… ! *sigh* another trinket to add to her growing collection.

After we return… Coffee practices the piano..lately she’s been into practicing a little every day..but quickly gets frustrated when she can’t understand something…a habit that I have to try and fix! Anyways..she has finished one book of songs…then she heard kid’s voices and went out to play. While we were outside and I was talking with the neighbor mom… Uncle Bean drops by… he’ll be driving Gramma Bean to the “service” about 2 1/2 hours away..but it’s the big Golden Week vacation and traffic will be extremely heavy. So they’re playing it safe and leaving about 7:30. The service starts at 11:30, or so I’ve heard.

One by one in the late afternoon… all the Beanies start to come home. Gramma Bean hobbles home..she has bought some stuff for dinner… and then Papa Bean comes home. We have all eaten dinner and now Papa Bean is getting ready for another wedding tomorrow, twiddling around with his cameras. Gramma Bean is once again glued to the TV…watching some news about the Olympic Torch and about the fact that a famous panda at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo has died, but she has just now started to get ready for tomorrow’s trip. As I type this…Coffee is next to me…with the Japanese-English dictionary…pushing the buttons and reading a bunch of jibberish she has just punched in to me… “Get it?” she asks…   I shake my head… She then finds out how to use the calculator and she is diligently using it to add… oh no… we opened Pandora’s box for her..hopefully she’ll forget what a calculator is when going to school!

That’s about it for now. Coffee’s having a bath with Papa tonite. We take turns. Then they’ll go up and Papa will lay down with Coffee until she falls asleep. Until next time!