Moving up a gear

We're at the end of 14 months of aberration from what was normal life over the previous four years. I've just sent David off to his first official day of work at school (students don't start till next Tuesday).

David working with some high school student on
maths last year.

It's been a crazy ride, but I'm glad that we've had a window of down-time over the last several weeks. In Australia we had little down-time. School holidays and weekends were filled with visits to family, friends and supporters. There was a distinct pressure to squeeze as much as we could into our year at home. A pressure to spend as much time with family and friends as we could. Those times were precious. But it was also tiring.

In Japan we don't feel that pressure. Of course there are other pressures.

Now we enter nine months of intense school year. There are only three and a half weeks holidays in the school year between now and next June!

But it's good to be back and settling back into routines. The boys aren't going to appreciate having breakfast at 7.20 each day (one of our boys came down for breakfast at 11.45 yesterday and was grumpy that it wasn't still available). But they'll get used to it. The routine and some serious purpose is what we're in need of now.

We're looking forward to many things we've missed in our year away, including school sports (wrestling, anyone?), being more involved in the school community, Thrift Shop etc. 

But today, we've got some different things planned. I'm taking the older two to downtown Tokyo to a rather impressive board games (for big people) shop. Then lunch and they'll come to the new JEMA office* to help pack this year's member directories. Hopefully it will be a fun outing. Meanwhile our youngest son will be taken care of at school (where they provide staff childcare in these pre-school days). Hopefully he'll have a super day too. He's been showing signs of needing more people than our family can provide.

Tonight I'm just a little excited over a new cooking experiment. I've made my own mini pizza bases and frozen them. Tonight we'll try out making pizzas on them. If this works, I'll definitely do it again (pizza bases, for that matter take-away pizzas in general are quite expensive for a family with big hungry boys).


*JEMA stands for Japan Evangelical Missionary Association, an organisation that helps missionaries to Japanese people by "Networking and equipping our members to make disciples for Christ." It is the JEMA who puts out the Japan Harvest magazine I work on.