Sawa goes to the movies

Sawa loves cell-phone videos.  She never tires of videos of herself playing with Sophie-Clare or with her cousins. We recently introduced Sawa to nature videos.  She loves them too, and it's a great way to keep her still while I blow-dry her hair.

We were briefly terrorized by constant demands for Zou-san (Mr Elephant).  Then I found she loves snakes and sharks.  Apparently these fears are learned.

Sawa enjoys choosing the next video from the thumbnail images.  Recently we did snakes and birds. She chooses very quickly and according to mysterious criteria. (These images were all chosen by Sawa from the BBC animal video archive.)

The documentary Babies by French director Thomas Balmès had her in a trance and she's been demanding it ever since. The BBC Neanderthal video that featured cave floors, not so much.  Sometimes she laughs, including at a charmed snake that kept lunging for its handler's knee, and at a colony of hopping puffins on the Farne Islands. Sometimes we have arguments, like when she insisted that seals are dogs, and that black vultures are elephants.  She wins, of course.

Hallowe'en

Last year Sawa was delighted to be a mouse, and went door-to-door.  This year she was a very reluctant lion, and went to bed hungry.  She hated the hood and wore it only briefly at the daycare where they did trick-or-treating.  After daycare we went out for dinner to leave time for meeting our neighbours.  But Sawa was feeling out of sorts, so we left the pizzeria the way the Americans left Vietnam, padded home through the cold rains from Hurricane Sandy, and put Sawa to bed. Then we carved a pumpkin, which she enjoyed tonight.

A dress for Sawa

Jacob's cousin Vera is to marry Edward this weekend in Ottawa.  Sawa was getting a bit big for the lovely dress that her grandmother Keiko made, so Keiko bought her a new one. When we got to choosing the dress, we had a little trouble, and so we ended up with two.  More photos here.

Poo stew

He did it!

We often weigh Sawa before her bath.  Yesterday she weighed 12.6 kg.  It looked like she was finally starting to put on weight after almost 11 months of bouncing around between 12.0 and 12.4 kg.  Today she weighed 12.9 kg.  We should have known something was wrong.

I came armed with a towel to pluck her from the tub where Ayako was playing with her after cleaning her dirty feet, skinned knees, grimy hands and soup-covered face and hair.  But I had to ask, "Whose huge poo is that floating in the tub?"  "Not mine," said Ayako, a bit too smoothly.  "Nothing that size could possibly come from Sawa - it's the size of her arm!" She ignored me.  "She must have just done it," Ayako replied, as though it were physically possible for an 18 month old toddler to drop a log that would do a metamucil-eating lumberjack proud.  As Ayako drained the tub and threw the larger pieces into the toilet, I weighed Sawa again.  12.7 kg.  Only 200 g?!  It looked solid, not foamy, and I'm sure it weighed more.  Perhaps they were both guilty....

Whoever was to blame, one thing was clear: Ayako was now winning the Eau de Toilette Championship with a score of 2-1.  I feel that this should be 2-1.5, since my turn happened to be when I was parenting alone, and I had to clean tub, child, and self single-handedly, like a solo circumnavigator in an Antarctic gale.

Sawa learns reproductive physiology of the hen

Grandpa Etches, who is an authority, visited today and taught Sawa that eggs come from inside hens.  The hen is in two pieces, attached by velcro, and the egg is fuzzy and sticks out the sides.  Today's children are the scientists of tomorrow.

Sawa talk

Words Sawa knows:

Uh-oh
Bye
Hi
Up
Out (going outside)
Wha-wha (this increasingly means dog, but can also mean giraffe, cat, monkey, bird, etc.; Japanese dogs say wan-wan)
Pow (means Pounce, our cat)
Dada (not too often)
Mama (less often still)

ASL signs Sawa knows:

More (but this means "give me" to Sawa)
Book
Breast
Shoes (maybe...)

Gestures Sawa uses:

Pick me up (arms raised)
Over there (pointing)
Get me out of my high-chair (removes high chair tray)
Let's leave the house (brings us her shoes)

Black rain and Spring flowers

The plum blossoms are out, and smell heavenly. This photo was taken yesterday a few yards down the road.  The weather has been cool, sunny and quite windy.  Very refreshing.  There is a small organic farm in our neighbourhood owned and operated by a guy our age.  He has a self-serve road-side stand for neighbours.  Strawberries are in season here and his have the most exquisite perfume.

We’ve been looking for informed expert opinion about the radiation risks for our area given the reactor trouble to the North.  Via The Guardian, a British expert panel discussion at the British Embassy in Tokyo is extremely reassuring. The short story: the worst case scenario is long term contamination of a 30km radius, with no health effects in Tokyo.  If you are worried, it’s definitely worth reading the transcript.  The modelling results from the Nulear Regulatory Commission in the US that led to a recommended exclusion area of 80km do not seem inconsistent with the British evaluation.

Also via The Guardian, a blog post at Nature provides a quick, technical-but-plain-language refresher on what radiation is for those of us who slept through physics class.

In spite of the absence of a radiological risk to Tokyo residents, several embassies, including the British, French and Australian, have recommended that their citizens consider leaving the Tokyo area.  This is because of infrastructure concerns, not radiation. Also keep in mind that Tokyo is in great shape compared to the humanitarian crisis along the North-Eastern coast.  Infrastructure damage,  the large affected area, and the large number of evacuees have led to unmet need for warmth, food and medicine.

An electrical blackout is imminent here, so that’s it for now.  Also time to change a diaper.  Again.