Emotions and boys

On Monday I went to a one-day Kanto Plains OMF ladies retreat. It was a lovely day! We not only got to catch up with one another, but we heard three talks from three of our own about health: physical, spiritual, and emotional. I think of myself as fairly healthy in general, but it was good to review these areas and think about them from different angles.

One thing that I found particularly helpful was in the "Emotional Health" segment. Our speaker spoke about how important it is to name our emotions. That is something that I do quite naturally, especially when I find myself feeling out-of-sorts, I'll think and think until I've traced the source of the unease. Once I've done that I can usually name the feeling and, hopefully, do something about it.

But I realised that there are others in our house that aren't so good at this. In fact probably everyone else except me. Is that a male thing? I learnt a long time ago not to ask my husband how he's feeling unless he's been ill. I usually get a confused and slightly panicked look from him!

My boys are each quite different in emotional responses. We have one drama king. We have another who's passionate and explosive and a third who's generally very calm, but when frustrated can dissolve into tears.

I described one emotional incident of one of our non-teenagers to the mother of a teenage girl and she was amazed, "Sounds like a teenager to me!" she declared. This same boy is very resistant to talking about his feelings. Not just unable or reluctant, but often down-right hostile. If he's in a good mood it's okay, but that is probably the exception.

So, given this poor emotional awareness in my family, I was pondering how I could help my guys with naming their emotions.

Our speaker gave us a page with lists of emotions. As I pondered and prayed over this dilemma, I realised that my boys love words. And one of them, the explosive one, loves lists of words. We have many little notebooks around the house that have lists of things he's begun (like lists of names, or of materials you can make things from, or of aliens). So I began to think that a list of emotion-words might be something of interest, rather than scorn.  I only managed to get one of the pages from our speaker (there were more than one), so I went Googling yesterday.

And I found this amazing page called Vocabulary of Emotions. I haven't counted the words on it, but there's more than two hundred words on this one page. There are some great words like: crestfallen, zippy, tickled pink, invalid, huggy, goose-bumpy.

I was right. This paper has been welcomed and discussed. I'm home on my own with our teenager right now (the others are at karate). While I washed up, we had a discussion about emotions. It was an issue for him when he was wrestling. A disappointment or surprise affected his emotional stability and ability to focus. So I asked him to name the emotions he had, particularly at those key moments that he remembers well: a loss that took him by surprise, a win that he didn't expect, etc. He was able to name lots of emotions using this chart. As I've typed, he's even used the list to help him with his homework (he's writing a narrative poem English about learning to ride a bike).

The page is posted on the wall beside the dining room table. I'm hoping that I'll be able to initiate many more discussions on emotions in the weeks and months ahead.

How do you teach these things at your house? Or is it something that's come naturally to your family?

Gales of laughter

I've been reading funny stories to the boys out of a book written nearly 40 years ago. The book's called "Japan: It's not all raw fish" by Don Maloney, an American businessman who has quite a flair for writing humour. The book is a compilation of a weekly column that he Japan Times, an English-language newspaper.
wrote for

Though his stories of Japan are a bit dated, there is enough in them for us to really enjoy them.

We're still laughing over the story about eating on the Shinkansen (bullet train). One time he was offered for lunch, "among other things — a 'mixed sandwich' (that means 90% bread, 1 % ham, 9% cucumber". Then one time he went for breakfast just after the "breakfast" in the dining car closed at 8.30 and was offered "Beef Stew, Curry Rice, or Mixed Pizza. "I almost decided on the Mixed Pizza — 8.30 or not — but then remembered that, in Japan, 'Mixed' is a translation of 'cucumber'..."

Every now and then someone will mentioned "mixed" and much laughter will ensue.

The most recent story I read produced wails of laugher at one point also. But first I need to explain a little. The author couldn't understand why taxi drivers didn't respond to his clear instructions in Japanese. Then one day his secretary witnessed an interaction in a taxi and gave him this advice,

"Please understand, your Japanese is fine. It's just that taxi drivers – and many other Japanese, too — make up their minds when they see you that you speak a foreign language, not Japanese. So, even when you speak Japanese, they're all tuned to hear a foreign language and that's what it sounds like. Try warming them up first," she advised, "with an "Ano ne," or with a "Sumimasen" (Japanese attention getters) repeated a couple of times. That will tune them back to Japanese and you'll be okay."

We've experienced this phenomenon ourselves. The most memorable being when I was pregnant with our second son and attending a large university hospital for a pre-natal checkup. For some reason I had to go to the in-hospital pharmacy to have a script filled. The pharmacy had a little hole-in-the-wall for outpatients, so we fronted up there. This tiny young came to the counter to serve us. We started to talk in Japanese to her and she fled. She just ran away leaving us wondering what we'd done. She went to get someone else braver, someone she thought would manage these scary foreigners better!

Back to the story in the book, the author tried his secretary's advice one night and this is what happened:

"We were rolling along at the usual 80 km/h, and about five or six blocks from the traffic light [where we needed to turn] I leaned forward an gave him my opening 'Ano ne'. Completely shocked, he hit the brake with both feet. As the tires squealed like a mailman's bicycle, I went over the back of the front seat and was standing on my head next to the driver."

At this point in the story, it took a long time for everyone to regain composure and quieten down enough for me to finish the story, relaying the satisfying news that the taxi driver did indeed follow the author's instructions, to the letter, after this.

No doubt there are many other foreigners out there with their stories. We've heard stories of experience foreign looking missionaries who were accompanying fresh Asian-looking recruits and have had conversations with a Japanese person looking only at the Asian-appearing person. Yes, how you look is important!

P.S. It isn't a book I'd give to the boys to read because there is language that dishonours God in it, plus there are numerous references to things that they simply wouldn't understand. I do my best to edit those out as I read. Even so, we often struggle to get through a story without repeated interruptions from our youngest asking for clarification.

Update on my birthday month

It's one week into my birthday month. It was my actually birthday last week so I had some interesting days.

My Kindle, with it's green cover.

My big birthday present was a Kindle. Not really a surprise, but it was great nonetheless.I didn't know that my husband would also give me a beautiful green cover for it! It feels delicious.

I also received some surprise flowers delivered to my door. . . All the way from Australia. I didn't know you could do international flower delivery! It was sweet indeed.

Mum and Dad rang me on Skype before everyone came home and we talked for nearly an hour. That was very special too.

I went to the gym on my birthday and they gave me a present too (face washer, US=wash cloth?). The average age at Curves is early 60s, I think. So I definitely feel young there! It was a good thing to do, deliberately celebrate my "youth" with the exercise that gives me energy.

On Saturday a parcel arrived from one of my sisters, as well as emails and eCards during the week. Not to mention lots of god wishes on Facebook. Makes me ashamed of how infrequently I wish people happy birthday on Facebook.

But we did make a mistake. Next year I'll plan to celebrate my birthday not on a school night. We went put to a restaurant one night and it nearly turned disaster outs. Hungry, tired kids in car in Tokyo traffic on a weekday evening equals trouble. The restaurant was great, but I wish we'd chosen to go on Friday night!

I'm glad I chose the "celebrate" route to turning 40, not the "hide under my bed and pretend it isn't happening".

It didn't make me hold my breath

Yesterday we went to our 13 y.o. son's second track meet for the season. It again evoked many feelings for me. Track and field is the "sport" that I know best of all the sports that CAJ fields teams in. I was a participant for many years, and represented my school for a number of years too, particularly in short distance events. So it brings back many memories and it makes me feel old. I reflected on some of those feelings in this blog post.

After a track meet two years ago I blogged about the difference in the sports programs drawing on our experience in an American-style international school and Australian schools. I'm surprised as I read it now that I could easily just copy and paste it and it would be suitable to post today!

Thankfully the difference between yesterday and the last blog link above, is that we didn't travel for 2 1/2 hrs each way in Tokyo traffic yesterday. These country-bumpkin Australians are finally realising that sometimes it is just easier to take the train. We had quite relaxing trips there and back, taking under 1 1/2 hrs each way. On the way back we even had SQUIRT time on a train for half an hour (even if we didn't call it that, the boys naturally took out their books and read).

It was much more relaxing than going to a wrestling meet. For starters, it isn't really our son's forte, so I wasn't nervous. Plus athletics is much more off and on. Rarely to you see a tussle that makes you hold your breathe like wrestling does. It is less personal. Often times there's nothing to see. They're doing discus in the far corner of the field, lining up athletes for a race, and registering the times and places of various runners for the previous race. Wrestling is far more intense, as a spectator, with one bout barely finished when another is on the floor in front of you.

I have to say, though, that you are far less at the mercy of the weather in wrestling. You sit in a comfortably warm gym. Yesterday we watched as the weather closed in. Thankfully we made it almost home before it started to rain in earnest! Some other athletes and their families weren't so lucky because they competed later in the day.

For the record, my son was very pleased with it 8.6m shot put "throw". He broke his PB by 1.6m!

Japan Photo #31 answer

Thanks for all who had a go at guessing the answer to Japan Photo #31.

Two people got very close, but my son's answer is just a little less polite than theirs. He says,

"It's to stop dogs peeing on the foundation of the historic castle."

Date confusion

Not only do I live with a measure of cultural, linguistic, and seasonal confusion. Our lives are plagued with date confusion.

Australians write the date Day/Month/Year.
Japanese write the date Year/Month/Day.

Fair enough. But then we end up at an American school where they write it Month/Day/Year. We also shop at an American shop (Costco) that have use-by dates on their products.

Arggghhh.

The easiest way for me to illustrate how challenging this can be is to take you on a quitck tour of our pantry and fridge. Here are some product use-by-dates:

This is the hardest: when all the dates are under 12!
By the way, the contents of this bottle have been
consumed and the bottle is being used to contain fresher
contents!

Now I don't think it is just because I'm entering my fifth decade that I struggle with this. It really messes with my brain if I'm in a rush, as I usually am.

Below is the smartest way to do dates when it is all this confusing. This is how I ensure others know what I'm doing (I'm yet to bring myself to write dates the American way).

Japan Photo #31

Here is another photo my eldest son took during his Kyoto/Nara trip, for the express purpose of my posting it here. 

Can you guess what this thing, on the side of a historic castle, is for?