Changing hats

A theme for the last two days has been regularly changing gears (or "hats" as my metaphor went in Australia).



It's been the 2 ½ day marathon of parent-teacher conferences at CAJ. Which means I've had the boys at home most of the time. It's just so happened to coincide with a lot of action on the magazine. So, I was an at-home mum, providing food, buying groceries, sorting out disputes, and encouraging homework; while also doing my best to wear my editors hat in quiet moments. But I also had out my missionary/writing hat when I finished off our prayer letter and wrote a blog post.

There were a lot of fast changes yesterday and it was rather exhausting. I'm afraid the boys spent a lot of time looking at screens while I concentrated on getting things done. 

Then at 4.30 I pulled out my exercising-with-a-friend hat as a friend introduced me to our local gym. She apologised for being a few minutes late, but I was actually glad. I got to sit by myself for a moment in the gym lobby and get the right "hat" on.

Then this morning I went to school with my definite "mum" hat on to participate in two hours of conferences with teachers of all three of my boys. Trouble is that many of these teachers are also my friends and all of them are David's colleagues! I tried to keep that "mum" hat firmly on my head, but it wasn't easy. The middle and high school interviews were 7-minutes long! So that was a lot of fast changes: Home Ec, History, English, Maths, Bible, Boy #3, Boy #2, Boy #1. Much worse, I'm sure, for the teachers, who have to do this for 2 ½ days long with so many different students!

This afternoon we have friends over for lunch (my "friend" and "mum" hats) then it's back to yesterday's "mum" supervising homework as well as "editor" trying to get some important emails out to potential writers for an upcoming issue of the magazine. I've got my work cut-out for me. 

Thankfully we have a fun night planned, so I'm looking forward to some down-time then.

How's your packing going?

When people think of missionaries going on home assignment soon, the first thing that comes to mind is: they must be packing. 

Actually we're not really packing, not yet anyway. If we were moving out, we'd probably be packing, but as we're not, we're leaving the packing till later. We are doing a lot of other small things, though, on top of our usual work commitments. Here are some from the last week or so:

This is the grungy carpet that we're replacing. The boys
helpfully suggested that actual wrestling mats would
make a good floor covering for this room... Hmmm.

• Emailing back and forth about an accommodation option in Australia
• Thinking about, praying, and discussing pros and cons of above accommodation option.
• Emailing relevant people about details surrounding our house sitters: owner's approval, permission for the owners to check out the inside of the house before our house sitters move in
• Emails about phones, mobiles, utilities etc. for both here and Australia. 
• A few meetings and several emails about the handover of my various roles.
• Family outing on Saturday to buy a new carpet for the lounge tatami room (old carpet stained and ugly). We also bought a new feeding container for turtle (for whom we've arranged a turtle-sitter for the 12-months), a piece of door frame that needed replacing, more moisture absorbers etc.  One the same trip we took the old oven/microwave back to electrical store who will dispose of it because we bought a new one from them.
• Changed the curtains in one boys' room from car-themed to floral. 
• Went through some old magazines that were piled up. Removed some good recipes, threw the rest of the mags out. 
• Went to OMF prayer meeting across town today with David. They prayed for us as we make this transition, especially because this will be David's last time to meet with them before HA. 
• Scrubbed my off-white winter jacket well, knowing I won't be wearing it for over a year. 
• Thinking about the management of our larder, so that we don't leave too much food behind.
• Continued scanning favourite recipes, so that we don't have to take recipe books with us.

And 

Had many conversations about "how you're g/doing" in our preparation.

Sorry, I know that isn't that fun to read through, not even for me! But it does help me to realise though we aren't specifically packing yet, we're doing a lot towards preparing for leaving.

So, perhaps, a better question than "How's your packing going?" is, "How are you holding up?" Or "Are the details coming together?"

Karate: a surprise

My two younger sons started Karate for the first time last week. This isn't something I saw coming! It is a culmination of a number of different things, including urging from one of my son's teachers.

Probably the biggest reason is that, after watching their big brother wrestle, they were keen to get into wrestling themselves. This was particularly the case with our extroverted, somewhat impulsive youngest. He was so keen to wrestle, but has no one his size to wrestle here. He's banned from wrestling at school in the classroom and in the playground (understandably), and was therefore a little frustrated.

One of a key discussion point among sporty kids at CAJ, especially as students go into middle school is, "What sport are you 'going out' for in the fall/winter/spring?"

The choices are limited. For middle school boys "fall" is cross country or soccer. Winter is wrestling or basketball. Spring is track (Australians call it athletics). Tennis fits in there somewhere or other, but I don't think it is an interschool competition during middle school.

Our eldest is a cross country/wrestling/track guy. So of course, younger siblings, being dragged along to watch their older brother will think about what they'll do when they get there.

Our youngest is quite verbal in his desire to wrestle in middle school, but that is still three and a half years away. And yes, I've counted that a few times, in only three years our youngest will be in grade 6 and in middle school! When you're seven and dead keen on something, three and a half years is like a lifetime of waiting.

Our middle son was less obvious in his desire to wrestle, but that is typical. He is a cautious soul. He thinks about things for quite some time, usually, before he commits himself. But he's been pondering wrestling.

So when a teacher suggested Karate, I jumped at the idea. And started planting seeds. I borrowed a book from the library about it and also showed the boys The Karate Kid, the original movie. This is how we work with new ideas in our house, especially with our two older boys -— give them lots of information and time to process it. Well, it seems that it worked.

We found out about a local Karate school that an American friend had had a good experience with and contacted them about checking it out. Last Wednesday afternoon my husband received a phone call saying, "Could you come this evening to watch?"

As I rushed to get dinner made, so my husband and our youngest could go and observe, our middle son piped up and said, "I want to go too!" I didn't even think of asking him. He nearly pulled out as they were walking out the door, but then decided to go anyway.

When they arrived home at 7.30, they brought the news that they'd both joined up!

I'm not a big fan of having kids, especially younger kids, involved in lots of extra-curricular activities. (I have a different opinion about older kids, by the way.) The younger ones need free time to just play, grow, and be imaginative. If not get homework down and enough sleep too. But now, it seems, we have our two younger boys doing swimming, and karate plus our youngest learning piano. Phew. I'm not sure I'm ready for all of this.

I asked our 7 y.o. over the weekend, if karate would help him wait to join the CAJ wrestling team and he answered, "Yes." Surprising me, though, his brother also said "Yes," even though the question wasn't directed at him.

One week to holidays

 One week today we're headed for our annual winter week in the mountains. We're hoping for snow. I just looked at their weather forecast. Today is currently 4 degrees Celsius, but the forecast was "much warmer" than yesterday. Wonder what yesterday was?

Yakiniku — cooking your own meat.

For several years (does three count as several?) we went sledding during this holiday. Last year the sledding place had closed down, so we went ice skating. This year we're wondering about trying out a day of skiing. 


Despite having lived in Sapporo, the "snow capital" of Japan, for four years, only David went skiing and only once. In between pregnancies, tiny babies, and challenging preschoolers, I never ended up going. I've grass skiied (once) and water skiied (a number of times), but snow would be a new medium. We'll see. For people who aren't used to spending that much money, the prices are scary!

Beautiful rock walls of Karuizawa look fabulous with a 

coating of snow.

We'll definitely have to go back to the Yakiniku place we found during our summer week there. That was fun!


Most of all I'm looking forward to not having to make the boys do school stuff. Lack of concentration on the task has been the rule of the day in the last couple of weeks. Just concentrating enough to get toothpaste onto one's brush and to do a decent job of cleaning them, seems too much, let alone completing homework for school and piano practice!


For today it is back to trying to finish one pair of tracksuit pants (US=sweat pants), wrapping presents for Australian family, piano practice with a boys, and maybe, just maybe, some more biscuit baking (US=cookie)!

Behind the scenes again

Yesterday when a Pest Control inspector spent some time hitting our walls and wandering around our home, we wondered what he thought we did for a living as we were both at home. We're clear (mostly) on what we do, but it is still not so easy to explain it to others. As soon as we say, "Missionary", we've sabotaged any decent relationship we might hope to have with our new acquaintance as the title comes with all sorts of baggage. I usually fall back on, "My husband teaches at an international school in Tokyo." Asked for my "job" I would usually say, "Household manager". Anyone have any better suggestions? Today we've been doing preparation work. Preparing presentations for a ladies group and for our mission's national conference. We've considered audio visuals, put together a fun game/quiz, brainstormed what to include in our presentations and then narrowed it down and organised them. I've played around with iMovie to see if I can liven up our "10 minute missionary spot" for Sunday mornings. I've also arranged a whole-day babysitter for a mid-week workshop that we both want to attend (about the elephant) in a couple of weeks. Several emails have bounced in and out regarding a short but multiple book review I'm doing at the above mentioned national conference and I've written and emailed a list of prayer points for a prayer update our mission puts out. Yesterday I finalised our prayer/newsletter and sent it to be photocopied and sent out (will email it tomorrow or Thursday). Are you tired of hearing all the background work that a missionary does? How about some background "mum" work? This morning we had a delayed reaction. Monday morning - it seemed - came a day late. That is the morning that our middle son goes as slow as Telstra does when they have to fix a problem :) This morning he had a tantrum even before I got out of bed and eventually got relegated to his bunk bed (which he insisted was inhabited by three mini spiders) until he could regain control. After breakfast I accidentally discovered that he didn't like the toothpaste that he's been "using" for many days now. Actually I wonder if he's been cleaning his teeth at all! This was not a pretty scene. He's our most actively stubborn...and I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Let's just say I can no longer pin him to the ground and do it myself. I've also cleaned the bath and bathroom sinks and mirrors. How's that for a day's work? Very soon now the rest of my responsibilities will be walking in the door and requiring food, homework supervision and hopefully with some kind of inspiration for Book Week. True to form, our middle son keeps changing his mind! And our eldest hasn't yet committed to anything. The costume that my 4 y.o. and I diligently put together last week was carried to PrePrep this morning, but he refused to put it on. I hope he did so later. I've decided not to cook tonight and asked my husband to order pizza (an uncommon experience for our family). So I can go to the gym before dinner. My poor husband might cop a bit of Book Week preparation. Oh well! You know, it is two months today since we boarded a plane to fly to Australia! The time has gone very quickly.

I killed the whinge with kindness

Yesterday afternoon my 9 y.o. came home with this note in his homework book: "Please have your son redo the cursive handwriting sheet. He refused to correct it in class." Hmmm. So, "Come and do your homework. You have this cursive handwriting to do." I barked as I started dinner preparation. "Oh, Muuuuuummmm. No fair. I don't want to." He shoved it onto the floor and grudgingly started his maths homework instead. "You have no choice. This is what your teacher requires you do it. No TV until you do." I stabbed the carrot with the knife, slicing it into rounds. "But it is so unimportant. Whyyyyyy?" "I'm not discussing this with you. We've talked about handwriting before. Do it." "Humf. (mumble, mumble)" "If you don't get it done before tea. You will not have reading time until it is done." I ordered. I wonder what consequence I can think up that will break the resistance? Chop, chop, chop. "Humf, humf..." came from the kitchen table. "Here are some carrots to give you some energy." I commented to my grumbler as I headed to give the rest to his brothers who were watching TV. (I frequently give raw vegetables to my boys during my meal preparation, it cuts down on grumbling and is healthy too. They love raw vegetables even more than cooked.) He made no comment, but continued to scribble his homework down. A little while later I cut open a packet of frozen beans to add to the vegetables already cooking, and knowing how much my oldest loves frozen beans, I handed him a couple, despite the continued grumbling. He immediately replied, "I don't know why you are being so kind to me." He then went on to complete all his homework without further complaints and indeed had a great attitude for the majority of the remaining three hours of his day! All of my consequence construction had not achieved was achieved by kindness. It was a very interesting response. Even more so when I reflected later on the similarities to comments by Martin Luther King Jr that I only read that morning as I re-read Yancey's "Soul Survivor". "A big danger for us is the temptation to follow the people we are opposing. They call us names, so we call them names..." p106 Of course the context is very different, but it made me wonder how often, in an effort to control my children, I end up using the same tactics as them. Ending up in the argument that they wanted me to have or I start mumbling and complaining, just like them. In yesterday's case, I'd set the limits, but continued to show love and kindness and it won the day. Something for me to ponder. I'll let you know if it works again!