Walking alongside older teens and young adult children

We're walking through that part of parenthood that is not often talked about among parents: parenting older teens and young adults. Well people do talk about it, but not deeply. We talk about what they're doing: "My son is in second year uni." or "He's applied to study XYZ" or "She's doing an apprenticeship." or "She's taking a gap year." But not much deeper than that. And generally the parents who have young adults who are struggling, don't talk about it at all (except to those very close to them). 

I have to say it's very challenging to watch our boys as they make their way through this period. A very different stage of parenting indeed.

I'm not saying that any of this is easy! And some
days it helps to wear this t-shirt a close friend
 gave me: "It is well with my soul."

I was greatly encouraged by a book recently about genius called Spark: How Genius Ignites, From Child Prodigies to late Bloomers. I didn't pick it up with the intention of seeking encouragement, but it was much more grounded than you might expect. It looked at the stories of thirteen people who have had significant success in their field: including art, literature, science, and business. But more than that, it looked at the combination of factors that helped these people find their niche and thrive (and yes, luck was one). One interesting feature was that the author specifically sought out people who began to thrive at different ages, from child prodigies to late bloomers.

One of those featured was Eleanor Roosevelt. The author quotes her as saying:

We are constantly advancing, like explorers, into the unknown, which makes life an adventure all the way. How interminable and dull that journey would be if it were on a straight road over a flat plain, if we could see ahead the whole distance, without surprises, without the salt of the unexpected, without challenge. I wish with all my heart that every child could be so imbued with a sense of the adventure of life that each change, each readjustment, each surprise—good or bad—that came along would be welcomed as a part of the whole enthralling experience.

Eleanor had an extraordinary career as a social activist, advocate, and diplomat. But she really didn't start to thrive until her middle age. I was most encouraged by the stories of those who took some time to find their way—it gives me hope about my own boys. You invest so much energy into them, you really want them to thrive as they move into adulthood.

So where does this leave me, as I walk alongside my young men (close-by and at a distance)? It gives me hope. Hope that they will one day find their place in the world, that they will find they are able to live meaningful lives that contribute to those around them, however that looks.

In the meantime I think I need to walk gently, not pushing and shoving, or meddling unduly in their affairs. I need to keep the communication lines open, which often means not talking about certain things. I need to hold back on giving unwanted advice, but be ready to give advice if asked. I need to allow them the freedom to make bigger mistakes than I might have when they were younger. I need to continue to do my best to make decisions that are moving them towards independence, whatever that looks like for each child. And believe me, it looks very different for each of my three!

We're missing our eldest son in Australia. It's been nearly two years since I've been able to hug him or give him a back rub (he planned to visit us last Christmas, but the pandemic has made travel in and out of Australia difficult and very expensive).

One thing we're really enjoying at the moment is a weekly family video call with him. Sometimes that just involves him, David, and me; but more often than not one or both of his brothers also join in. It's been a big step forward in keeping communication lines open with our guys. This month we've discovered a website that allows us to play boardgames. So far we've played games that I know, so I've been able to join in. It's a brilliant way to connect with our sons. I've learned that while most women are happy to sit down and just talk, men usually aren't wired that way. So, being able to do something like a board game together really helps. 

If you're wondering, it's boardgamearena.com that we've been using. To initiate games with people you know, you need to pay a small subscription fee.

Our July holidays

We went away for two weeks in the latter half of July and I jumped back into work on August 3, only to be swamped. I'm only just in the last couple of days starting to come up for some air! 

However, I want to tell you a little bit about our holidays before they get too far in the distant past. Because other prefectures are nervous about Tokyo-ites visiting them at the moment (many more cases of COVID-19 in Tokyo than in other places), we decided to have a very quiet holiday. We mostly stayed at the holiday home, or only went to places where there were virtually no other people close by.

We did lots of sleeping, reading, game-playing, and movie-watching. That probably sums up our fortnight away very well. It was at the same place as we went this time last year (and also at Christmas), a delightful Swiss-chalet house that OMF Japan owns and rents to its members at a low rate. We appreciate the views, the green-all-around, the peace, and a place without Wi-Fi.

As I did last year, I organised myself to not do any work during those two weeks, that included not looking at email at all. Our daily routine was simple and refreshing. To get even more sleep I also took time-out from caffeine. Not without a challenge (my body is very sensitive to caffeine), but in the end I manage to stay off caffeine totally for a week and have been on reduced caffeine in the two weeks since then (instead of 2 ½ cups of fully caffeinated coffee a day, I've had two half-strength cups a day, decaf coffee is a very handy thing, even if the coffee snobs turn their noses up at it). As I result I got 9 or 10 hours sleep every night for a couple of weeks, which was very nice indeed! During July I also stopped doing my daily Japanese review. The sum total of all that was lots of read and many books read. 

So, even though today I feel pretty blurry and am having difficulty thinking clearly, I know that I did have a good rest in July, so I'm hopeful that that will be a good thing for whatever lies ahead for the rest of the year. For starters, we've got our second son beginning year 12 next week. That in itself will potentially mean stress for the family, if it is anything like his big brother's senior year! Not to mention that we're by no means free of the wide-reaching consequences COVID-19 pandemic.

But back to our holidays in the mountains. Staying "home" made things very simple and we slipped into a gentle routine. Dinner and an evening movie we did together, sometimes late afternoon included games. Watching a movie each night was something we did last year also and it seems to be a helpful way to enjoy the holiday as a family, as well as provide fodder for conversation around the table. We watched The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series, then several other older movies like Back to the Future, Forest Gump, and Jonny English. 

All these latter movies were borrowed from a local DVD rental store—yes, Japan still has them! But let me tell you that it's not easy to find movies in a Japanese store if you're an English speaker. Have you ever thought about learning "alphabetical order" in another language? Japanese has its own order! And even if that is fine, and your Japanese reading is up to scratch, many English movies have completely different titles to their original versions.

Things are ramping up again now in our house with both David and I have worked full-time this week and school starts (I say YAY) next Thursday. But we think back fondly to our July holiday with great thanks that we could take the time off and had a place to go, and look forward to next time we can recharge like this!

Here are some photos from from our time away:

We caught the last two weeks of the rainy season and everything was very
green. This was one of the trees in the local park where we played Park Golf.

Park Golf. I am appalling at it, but it's a fun activity (if you don't record your score).

This lily's flower was bigger than my hand!

A cute frog posing on our youngest son's hand.

We had many rainy days and only saw two sunsets. This is the view that we could see from the dining
room and lounge area.

David and I went on a couple of local walks. Beautiful!

Wild boar trap along one of the roads we walked on.

Reading my Kindle at the dining table...with a view.

We took one 1,000-piece puzzle loaned to us by friends, it was fiendishly difficult. An overall picture of Yoda,
but made up of 1,000s of micro pictures.

Wet = fungi. I had my eyes open for some photogenic mushrooms in the park.

One of the two sunsets we saw from our living area.

Inside our holiday apartment. Our middle son loves this loft. He set up
his bed and recreation area up there. Our bedroom door is on the right of the photo,
the other side of the ladder is the entrance to the bathroom and far left of photo
is the kitchen. It's pretty compact, but the lofty ceiling with exposed beams
makes it feel spacious.

In the last couple of days the volcano we were perched on showed its peak.
This is taken from the verandah.

So live

I'm still struggling to find some open space for swimming. That's how I'm phrasing my current "status" at the moment.

It's less than four weeks till we walk away from our lives here in Japan and move to Australia to spend half a year talking to people about what we do in Japan. Preparing for that continues to seem quite messy right now. I'm hoping that I'll have a clear run at getting my current responsibilities under control in these next few days, but every time I see a bit of clear space to swim forward, another "piece of debris" turns up to hinder my movement forward.

Today, it is email-sending difficulties. That always flusters me because when you send an email you trust that it goes to where it should, especially if your computer says it has gone and you don't get an error back. However I am periodically getting messages from people asking about an email reply that I sent and they didn't receive. That's a big concern when I've sent about 140 emails from four of my five regularly used work email accounts in the last 12 days (when the trouble seems to have begun). Yep, my work is very reliant on email.

It's easy to be flustered and I admit I've been there today. Then, late this afternoon, I remembered this article that I saw over the weekend: 
http://www.alifeoverseas.com/death-is-right-around-the-corner-so-live/

Here's a particularly good quote: 

Living and working cross-culturally is hard, and we often forget the joys of the little things. We need rhythms of rest and Sabbath to restore us, to remind us of how much we need the “sensible and human things.”

The content in quotation marks is a CS Lewis quote.

Though I know that it delayed my dealing with all the things I need to deal with in preparation for this move, I'm really glad that I spend my Saturday doing "sensible and human things".

Basically we "played". Friends invited us and another family over for a final get together before we leave. These are two families that we've spent quite a lot of time with over the last three years, socially, and at school events, especially sport, as our kids competed together. Two of our kids graduated together last year. We've travelled together (one of the mums I travelled with to Korea with and shared a room). One family we've camped with several times. These friends have become something like the family you have when you aren't near family.

On Saturday we were invited to lunch. Before we left, David and I spent time in the kitchen together preparing some things to share (I made tortillas from scratch and he made waffles and a yummy chocolate, nutty sauce to go with). That creating in itself was therapeutic.

Then lunch was tasty and fun. I did not expect it to morph into an afternoon of fun, though. The adults played card games and the seven kids kept themselves entertained (eldest 18, youngest 8). At one point I video-called our eldest and everyone spontaneously sang happy birthday to him and several chatted a little with him.

We got home at about 5.30pm. My love-tank was full to overflowing. We'd laughed our way through the afternoon. It was the first day that week that I didn't take a pain killer for a headache!

We didn't get anything done to prepare for our move at the end of the month, but we were reminded to live, and in doing so, attended to our well-being. So as I continue to try to swim forward through all the cluttered water ahead of me, I'm bolstered by the rest we engaged in on Saturday.

Rock-paper-scissors is a cultural keystone in Japan

We've seen many situations where adults decide things using the rock-paper-scissor game. This article really is true.

The most memorable was when we were driving to church several years ago. To this day we call a certain intersection in our area by the name Jan-ken-poi (rock-paper-scissor) because we saw some adults who were going to record traffic flow on the intersection doing this to decide who got which corner!

What are you doing?

We've been home now for ten days and we're well and truly settled into holiday mode. Well I'm working, but on reduced hours. Breakfast is a eat-it-when-you-get-up affair and bedtimes are a little later. We're still eating lunch and dinner together most of the time.

The boys are sitting around doing lots of electronics, but our agreement does mean that we have leverage and they're being pretty good about taking some reading time also. Exercise has been a little harder to get out of one or two of them. Creativity? Varies per boy. Our eldest has been playing around on his guitar a lot and changed the strings today. Our youngest has been slowly putting together a scrapbook from our trip, but he's easily distracted by electronics. Board games and movie afternoons/evenings have also been a part of our days.

As I type the third dinner in a row is being prepared by a boy. The boys have varied considerably in their willingness and ability to manage doing this. Most of the time I've been needed as a consultant if not a motivator in the kitchen with them. This current meal is proceeding well at present (oldest boy, one would hope so).

Pokemon Go. Yes, that's entered our house (it came to Japan only last Friday). Because our boys don't have roaming data plans, they are stuck at home or at wifi spots, or, with David or I going with them with our phones as portable wifi. That limits them quite a lot, but is better for our pocket. David's gone walking with one boy a couple of times and this afternoon I'd planned to go for a ride to my favourite park. I really wanted to go on my own, because I enjoy the serenity. 

However I tried to be a good mum and tossed the idea out that anyone who wanted to come with me could. Well I ended up taking the two boys who have gotten into Pokemon. It was a bit of a deal. First one then the other couldn't link with the wifi on my phone, then one would lose GPS on the game or the app would become unresponsive. Most of all they needed to learn how to "lead" us around the park (i.e. check with the other about if it was okay to go and to say "let's go". These two boys don't usually get on that well, so it was all a bit of a challenge (complicated by my lack of understanding of the game). 

We went past this little playground in the park. It struck me as noteworthy
that my parenting has changed. The boys used to get so excited about swings and
slides and things to climb on...now they're excited about catching imaginary
things on their phones!

However we did get outside and ride more than 10km. And we're all still talking to one another! The park was nice, but as "tethered" as I was to these gaming boys, I couldn't go far. So I didn't find anything too fun to photograph.

This is a type of cherry blossom, obviously not blooming now. There was a Pokemon stop here and the app
named what type of tree it was, kind-of cool!

David's doing lots of reading, playing games on his iPad, and doing a particularly tricky jigsaw puzzle (penguins). Actually I think most people have been dropping in to do a couple of pieces every now and then—it's about all we can manage at once.

As for me, I'm gradually working my way through a To Do list that contains a number of projects in-between regular household tasks like grocery shopping, and vacuuming.

Tomorrow we will all get out of the house and go into the city to help pack and post the magazine issue I helped finish off while we were camping. We may stop for a treat while we're there...that's not been decided yet. Oh, and I believe a little bit of Pokemon hunting will be going on too.

Photos from the previous 10 days

I posted a number of photos on Facebook over the last 10 days. Here are some that show you something of what we've been up to.

The view from our living/dining area of the holiday house. So great to see space and distance!

We encountered an international curling competition and got to watch a little. So much attention to detail!

I found these plastic eyes (and a number of other variations) for putting in food. We "played" with our food a bit! This is our youngest son's creation.

This is the volcano that we were living at the base of. Mt Asama. There was a pretty constant stream of steam coming from the crater. It's the most active volcano on our island, Honshu. It is 2,568m above sea level. We were staying at about 1,000m above sea level. 

We enjoyed an all-you-can-eat restaurant one day (and ate practically nothing else that day). It included unlimited meat that you cooked at your table in this recessed BBQ.

Christmas was a quiet day at home. We were pretty pleased with the simple table decorations that we'd gathered (runner bought just before we left Australia for less than $5).

A new board game has been enjoyed: Pandemic. This one is different in that it is everyone working together to beat the diseases.

Today I got out of the house and rode to the park on my own. The serenity was delicious. The weather was brilliant, except that it was about 10˚C.

The autumn colours have disappeared from the trees, but the sky was blue and a tinge of green remains in some of the grass. Additionally, the gardeners have planted some decorative plants/flowers. I don't really know what to call these colourful cauliflower-like plants, but you see them around the place at this time of year. They really do look exotic.

Tip toeing through the forest of parenting in an electronic age

Today's the first day of the Christmas/summer holidays for our boys. We're trialling a new strategy. This is what the boys found when they finally got to the breakfast table:

Knowing that our boys can whip up a storm of nitpicking at the words and rules, we've deliberately kept it simple and generous to start with. It's generated some interesting discussion, especially, "We think that unlimited is too much screen time."

I countered with, "I did modify it with 'virtually'! But our goal is to help you do some self-management here." 

We don't want to be spending the holidays with stopwatches in our hands and be fighting constantly over how long they spend on electronic devices. We also want them to begin to self-limit.

Note that as I type at 9.46am, all the above jobs have been done and the boys have gone out for a jog/ride together. No protesting, no problems!

Note also that we'll be taking them to 1 ½ hrs of wrestling training this evening, and insisting on electronic-free reading/rest time after lunch.

We've limited their access to electronic things much more in the past. Usually they get half an hour each on Saturday and Sunday (with only a little more on holidays). And TV is rarely on for more than 45 minutes in a day (except when the cricket is on). 

But with our eldest (15) buying his own tablet three months ago, the balanced has shifted a little. We haven't restricted his time on his own tablet except when homework wasn't getting done, or other important tasks. I'm not sure if we were wise or not. Like all parents of our age, this is new. We're tip toeing through territory that didn't exist when we were young.

But with the younger two having school iPads next year and our oldest having a "Bring your own device", things are about to get more complicated. So, we continue to tip toe.

Origami, rubbish sorting, and all sorts of fun

Musical night
On Friday night I went to our younger sons' school musical. The kind where everyone has a role, there were hardly any main parts. It was written by staff and fairly well done. The whole thing was exploring freedom and what that means, especially when we walk away from our Creator.

A scene from the musical. Most of the kids were dressed
 the same: in white shirts (Grades 1-6), so it wasn't easy to
pick out  your  own child! I'm also not used to having
so many Caucasian faces in my boys' classes, reverse culture shock?

What I didn't expect was to run into so many people who I knew. I met two people I knew from my high school Youth Group. I didn't know that either of them had children at the school. I also met three other people from more recent times. Two of them didn't know we were back in the country. It was a bit awkward because I'd walked up on a conversation the three of them were having. For a second or two it looked like they'd seen a ghost!

Relaxing start to Saturday
On Saturday morning I stayed home with David and the boys went to wrestling training alone. I chatted on the phone with a long-term friend who I'd been playing phone tag with for several weeks. Then I got dressed and baked some biscuits. It was a lovely morning in. 


Up the mountain

Doing origami (in the foreground). The boy in the black
shirt (our son) is teaching a group of people. The gomi
game is on the other side of the room.

Mid-afternoon we headed off for Tamborine Mountain. This "mountain" is a 28km square plateau 525m above sea level. It is inland from the Gold Coast and has a strong tourist element. It also has a strong Christian mission link, with a Convention Centre (a flashy name for something that isn't actually that flashy) which holds many Christian conventions and camps. OMF used to own a campsite up there and we spent many a weekend "on the mountain" in our young adult years. We actually first started our application to OMF back in 1998 at a mission convention up there.

We've also got strong connections with the Presbyterian Church on the mountain. This was the fifth time we've visited there over the last 15 years. It was a joy to be back, even though two of our most enthusiastic supporters who happened to be from this church have now gone to be with the Lord.

Gomi Game
This group is trying to understand
the sorting instructions. The green sheets
are the "bags" they have to sort into.

The church organised a bring and share "curry night" as a fundraiser for three of their young people who are going on short term mission trips in the next few months. Each of them had a short time to be introduced to the group. It was a great idea to combine that with our visit, because we ended up with more attendees than we would have alone. About 30-40 adults and 20 children came along, more than either we or the organisers expected.

We shared fairly briefly an update on what we'd been doing and then jumped into some fun. We ran a Japanese slipper-chopsticks relay. It nearly derailed because we gave them MnMs to use the chopsticks on, and that was just a bit too tricky for most people.

After that we split into two groups. David ran our Gomi Game (Garbage Sorting Game) with one group. Two of our boys and I did origami with the other group. Unfortunately we ran out of time and didn't get to swap the groups over.

An adult helping a girl change her shoes
in the relay.

We finished by playing a Youtube video of Japanese Christians singing "Blessed be Your Name" in Japanese, with subtitles. I don't know how many sung along, but I certainly did. I had a lady come up afterwards saying that she'd never heard Japanese people worshipping and was quite touched by this short video. We missionaries do spend a lot of time talking about how many people don't know Jesus, and sometimes forget to encourage people to pray for those who are Christians. It was the first time we'd tried this and it seemed to work well.

Sunday
We had a 10-15 minute slot in the morning service and filled that with some stories and a couple of videos. I didn't feel that great about what I'd said, but sat down afterwards truing to remind myself that "It's not about you, it's about God." I was, therefore, amazed afterwards to have people come up and say things like "You are a breath of fresh air." and "We loved hearing from you today."

Our eldest son loves making cranes. Here he made a tiny
one out of some left-over paper. The coin is a 10 yen
piece, about the size of an Australian dollar coin.

During the sermon all five of us went out and ran the Sunday School. It's days like that that I love being married to a teacher. He just ran with it and I followed along like his assistant. After an introductory talk we dressed up two children in summer kimono. Then we did a slipper-kindy hat relay (a whole lot easier than the night before). And finished off the time by  teaching origami. Our boys were fantastic with this, all able to teach a couple of different figures.

Afterward I caught up with a missionary from Wycliffe who I'd known through my church during my uni days. Actually a whole bunch of Wycliffe-associated folk were at church. They'd been doing some training at the Convention Centre. Several of them talked to us afterwards. One said it was so nice to be at a church where another missionary got up to speak about some other ministry. Yes, I would agree. Sometimes as missionaries it gets to be a bit lonely, being the only "visitor" and the only ones talking about mission. This church is such an encouragement because they are very mission minded and often have mission-related events on.

I came away tired, but elated. It was an encouraging weekend. One where we got to do "fun stuff" more than serious "talking from the front". Quite up my alley!

BONUS
The bonus yesterday was that our point person forgot to organise for someone to have us for lunch before we drove back to Brisbane (he'd organised overnight accommodation with a family from church, though). So instead the church gave us money to buy our own lunch, apologising all the way.

The bonus of this was being able to just be ourselves over lunch and go home when we were done. We arrived home at 2pm and had a lovely long afternoon chilling at home. We finished this weekend in better shape than we did last weekend. Very thankful.

Sort your rubbish?

Today has been more planning for presentations. Boring stuff to write about on a blog, really!

Rubbish collection station around the corner from
our house in Tokyo.

The fun thing was talked about over lunch, however, was an idea we've had for some time but haven't had time to put it into action. Aside from talking in front of groups of people in formal-type situations, sometimes we get the opportunity to do some more interactive things with groups. These are so much fun! In the past we've done slipper relays, chopsticks challenges, origami, a Japanese receipt game, and a language learning activity. 

This time we want to do a Rubbish Sorting Game. Sorting the rubbish in Japan is complex but a game based on this has the potential to make a fun activity to give people a feeling of culture shock. It's just that there are so many ways we could do it. We've been bandying around ideas for months now, but not gotten very far.

We talked in more detail over lunch about it today, though, and David's actually written some things down. Perhaps we'll make some progress on this soon?

It certainly takes our mind off the internet troubles that we continue to experience. Today we were supposed to have someone come, supposedly to "connect us up", but it didn't happen. The "outside team" that would make sure there was a connection that came from the street (as far as I understand it) didn't show up so the technician that did had nothing to connect up to. 

And so we continue to wait. But we're not in too bad a way, as long as we can continue to use this mobile internet out the back in our "patio office" it works pretty well and decreases the incentive to work at night-time when it's coolish out here.

How's it going?

Email from a friend: "How are you guys coping this week?"
My reply: "We're okay. A bit swamped by work, but in good spirits. The boys are all being pretty good too, which helps."

A birthday

As I mentioned yesterday, we had a birthday this week. That resulted in:

A great conversation with my parents:

• Grandson turning 15 big changes in him. Skype is great!
• Photo book arrived, looks great.
• Moving details (they store our stuff while we're away).

The boys "gaming".

Presents

• Particularly a new game (not technically a board game, but something of a hybrid between a board game and a card game): 7Wonders. The boys have been playing every spare moment, including all day today (with two extra boys, friends of our eldest from mid afternoon).

Self Maintenance

I took myself to the dentist for a checkup and the hairdresser for a trim this week. Felt great to get these routine-type things out of the way.

A good antidote for me about feeling overwhelmed by work is taking time out to socialise with friends. I had a couple of opportunities to have coffee with friends this week. It helped me keep my perspective and positive attitude.

Some projects coming to conclusion

I've received the proofs of the "31 Days of Prayer for Japan" booklet that I spent a lot of time on late last year and earlier this year. Looks like it will be out in time for our home assignment. Just need to get it proofread and marketed now!

The Japan Calendar 2015 that I've worked on the last couple of months is also coming to a conclusion. This year we're adding Portuguese and German to the English version. Wonderful progress!

The end is in sight for the Spring issue of Japan Harvest. I'm also getting to the end of the editing phase of the Summer issue. I might be able to do that before I hand it over in a couple of weeks.

Today got our last prayer/newsletter out (though there is still a couple of knots to sort out, with some addresses not being sent to). That is the last prayer/newsletter for this term of service. Great!

As I wrote above, the photo book I've worked on this year about this term of service has arrived at my parent's house (cheaper than getting it posted to Japan). My parents think it looks wonderful, great quality. This is a relief and I'm looking forward to using this flexible deputation tool.

David's finished the video we made with a couple of Aussies at CAJ giving their short testimony about how CAJ really contributes to their ministry. This is also going to be a great tool for deputation, in conjunction with another fabulous video that some American friends made for us.

David finished the rough draft of the last assignment for his Masters degree on Thursday. I'm proofreading it. It's going to be a great relief to get this finished.

It is wonderful to see these things coming to an end. That means that we're making progress in our preparation for moving, but also that we're getting ready to move into different roles for the year.

Cleaning

I cleaned the inside and outside of the windows in our bedroom today, including the screens. Seems like a small achievement, but it took a while. And again, it is a marker showing visible progress.

More furniture decided on

We've been getting various pieces of information about furniture that could be used by us in Australia. Needed furniture. It's required lots of emails and guessing/decision making. Challenging at times to get our minds around it all. But also a reminder that not only do we have good friends working on our behalf, which is a great encouragement, but also that God is supplying our needs.

Sports Day/Field Day (as the Americans call it)

5x200m relay. Our boys made up ⅖ of the orange team.

Yesterday it was the CAJ elementary sports/field day. I wasn't looking forward it, but it turned out to be okay. It was hot and despite using a hat, sunscreen, and an umbrella, and drinking 4L of fluid, my skin felt battered by the sun last night. On that note, Australians don't use umbrellas to keep the sun off them much, do they? That's going to be weird.

However I did get to touch base with a lot of people, as well as see my two younger sons perform very well in a number of events.

Here I am with a couple of friends.
I think our team should have gotten point for parents
wearing team colours. Orange is not a colour that is
in my wardrobe. I actually planned ahead and
bought this shirt at Thrift Shop for a very small
amount of money. See the orange umbrella that
my eldest son allowed me to use (it's his), it was
his idea, actually!

So, just in case you were asking: that's some of "How it's going" here!

Our Hokkaido Adventure Days 19 & 20

Friday 12th July

About 260 km. It was a pretty journey, as almost
all the journeys around Hokkaido were.

Odaito to Naka Satsunai via Kushiro

During the night we were surprised to find a fog had rolled in and everything got wet again, even those things under the annex. Thankfully we had sun later and were able to dry everything off before we packed up once more to move on.

Here ended our 14 days straight under canvas. The longest any of us have ever done that. I have to say I was a little regretful, I could have continued another week at least! I’ve found camping addicting!

We're always on the look-out for good parks. We found
some good ones on these two days.

We drove via Kushiro, quite a large city with 180,000 people. We stopped at a large park there for a leisurely lunch, play, and another chapter of The Hobbit (we’re getting near the end of the book now). It was chilly, even in the midday sun. We Tokyo-ites felt it, anyway. There were many children in the park enjoying their 'nice warm weather.' Many were playing in the artificial stream and the younger ones were very often running around in their wet underwear (in the absence of swimmers, I presume). I shivered inside as I watched them. I forget what the temperature was, but today as I type, Kushiro is 22℃ while we in western Tokyo sit at just over 30℃. Yes, it's generally cooler in Hokkaido!

This day's adventure took us through mountains and
then out onto the Tokachi Plain. This plain is like a
"bread basket". It provides food for about 3.5 million
people but only 350,000 live there.
This English-language website boasts of the enormity
of the plain. In reality it is only 10,000km² which is not
quite twice the size of Brisbane or about 2,000km²
less than the area of Sydney. It does, however, look
much more like Australia than most parts of Japan.
The wide open spaces filled with agriculture was a
wonderful sight for these Aussies.

After lunch we headed on to the village of Nakasatsunai (south of Obihiro),  about 4,000 people, where an OMF missionary is working. She is on her own there in a five-bedroom house. She welcomed us into her house for a couple of nights.

Playing games in "Aunty" Connie's living room.

She is a lover of games: board games, card games, dice games. And she has a large collection (though many had instructions in German, her native language). Our boys got into playing her games and then for dinner we walked a couple of blocks to a locally famous chicken restaurant. There we feasted on chicken baked over coals. Yum!

Our missionary friend had an English class from 7.30, so David joined them while I tried to put the boys to bed in a room. They were a bit skittish. We’ve been used to just going to bed all at the same time, with me reading The Hobbit to them. They didn’t settle easily when we changed the routine, but still I managed to get downstairs for the last few minutes of the English lesson and stay for the Japanese conversation time until 10pm. Needless to say it didn’t take me long to get to sleep after I went to bed.

Saturday 13th July

Nakasatsunai 

We gave ourselves over to being tourists again. Together with our hostess we played Park Golf at a beautiful nearby course and the boys enjoyed a large obstacle course there too.

Then she took us to a famous farm where they make cheese and caramel (and we watched this for a short while). We enjoyed some animals and watched a live show with the animals. The boys got to try milking a very patient jersey cow and I participated in a butter making competition (shaking a jar of milk for about a minute). We enjoyed cheesy pizzas and a fondue for lunch. After the show our afternoon tea was ice cream with caramel sauce. Mmmmm.

Enjoying park golf in a very green park. This town is
very close to the place where Park Golf was invented.

The area we were in has more cows than people, but evidently lots of chickens too! It was a little hard to remember that we were still in Japan. The paddocks are wide and flat and only when it is quite clear could you see the distant mountains that lie between us and Sapporo in the west (see the information under the photo above).

Later afternoon we returned with our colleague to her home and chilled out again with games (and me typing up our experiences).

The cheese factory.

Big horse. Little horse. We sat in some welcome shade
and watched a live presentation by the gentleman on
the big horse. Before the show we spent some time
giving the poor animals some fresh grass. It was odd,
the animals were in grassless pens, yet there were
large patches of grass nearby that needed mowing. Our
boys enjoyed feeding the animals with this free food.

More wide fields. Quite unusual in Japan.