Schmidt clan

Tuesday, 14 September 2010

Josephine off to Kindergarten

Me: "Josephine, can you just stand there for a second and I take a quick picture of you before you go to school?"
She goes to stand there. Shame, she's so good. And she stands there looking a little forlorn...
Me: "Josephine, can you try to smile a bit?"

Josephine thinking...."Um, what? It's still early Mamma! Give me a break!" Her daydreams are kind of being interrupted here...

...getting a BIT perkier...

Yeah! Now I'm ready to go to kindergarten!!! Let's go!!!

Another day....Josephine with her massive rucksack (mine). Has now been replaced with something a little more age/size appropriate. But, do you see the sheer joy on her face!?! :-)

And off we go to the bus stop! Bye!

Moving in!

So this is what we were up to last weekend...it has kept us rather busy...reason for no updates.
Everything went smoothly and the Japanese packers/UNpackers were very careful and hardworking, sweating it out in the heat and not wanting my refreshment offers (work ethics here?). Anyway.
The first bunch arrived to pick up our rented furniture at 8am and the next bunch arrived at 9am to unload the container.

the rented furniture from kitchen and lounge. Josephine aka "Sportikus" doing her sportikus tricks with Pappa

At port, they unloaded our things into 3 smaller trucks (everything in Japan is small compared to the rest of the world!)

And here, you can see the kids revelling in their toys and familiar things. "OH! Look!! Mamma! Here are my space goggles!!"

I love the pulled-down eyes! Looks warped somehow!

My little Evie

setting up Josephine's bed (one of the 4 Japanese guys helping here)

some boxes for the kitchen (a nice task for me to unpack. Thankfully done now!)

So, that's it!

I'll post of how the place looks once I get a chance to go around taking more pics.

PS the move happened (for my record) on 4-5th of September 2010

Friday, 3 September 2010

Josephine's first day of Kindergarten

Been down with a bad dose of flu since Tuesday. Strep throat, every muscle aching, headaches, fevers, chills, you name it. But life goes on. Boy it does!
Pulled myself "together" (finding bits of brain matter, limbs, nerves, etc scattered all over the house) yesterday morning to take Josephine to Kindergarten for her first day (she's not sick at all, phew!). She just went right on in, despite all my concerns and over-protectiveness. She wasn't overly bothered about where I was despite begging me not to leave her as we drove there in the car. I said I'd stay with her. Then after her not really worrying about whether I was there or not I asked her if I could go upstairs to make the bus arrangements and I'd come back down. "Ja. You can go." was what I heard. So I was allowed to leave and I made bus arrangements for an hour.
On Tuesdays they have "swimming days" and on Thursdays (yesterday) they have "Gym Day". So they went off to the big sports hall and had a good ol' run around. I came back about the same time they did and her eyes were SHINING!! "Mamma! I just having SUUUUUCH a luffly day!!!!" Wow, I thought! It sure does make a mother feel happy (ier) when her child is happy, doesn't it? Happy children = happy mother.
I am VERY proud of her!!

Michael will be returning from his week trip to Malaysia later today. Will I be glad to see him? Yes! Miss him terribly. But I'm looking forward to just crawling into a bed and lying still for a while.

And our container arrives tomorrow morning. Yay!! Hope my headache and fever is gone by then.

Monday, 30 August 2010

Ship news

Our stuff is arriving at our front door on Saturday, 4 September 2010 at around 10.30am. Before that, the rental company will come and pick up the rented items (beds, desk, kitchen table and dishes, 2 seater lounge piece, TV and some odds and ends)

LOOKING FORWARD to just settling down!

Will be 10 weeks.

Josephine's waterfall

trying to stay inside the lines - a waterfall.

Sunday picnic

On Sunday morning we had a lovely church service at Tokyo Baptist Church.
After naps, lunch etc, we took a walk down to the Tama river (about 200m from our place) and had a picnic. Josephine packed an empty fruit box with things she wanted to take to the picnic. Here's her picnic blanket (a bandana) and a little plastic hamburger.

our picnic blankets (beach towels that aunty Liesl gave us!)

Josephine making homes for some ants and just generally digging around

Evie going for a fly!

invigorated and chuffed Evie!

and...home for bathing. You can't see it here, but we had black feet from the dirt!

Trip to the seaside

Oh, Saturday afternoon was crazy wonderful!!!
We were supposed to go to the Mammal Exhibition, but as the kids woke up quite late and it was a bit of a trip, we decided spontaneously to go to the port at Yokohama and see if we could see our ship. Well, the latter part was far from visible - the port is massive!!! Could see some cranes in the waaaay distance. So maybe it was down there. Anyhow, where we landed up was much more fun! Check it out!

a passanger liner there (seems to be permanently docked here)

Pappa and Josephine

they had set up a temporary splash pool for kids!

one of the two "Redbrick Warehouses" - a sightseeing spot in Yokohama. Nice cool shops inside. Very unusual to "red" bricks in Japan, so it kind of stands out!