Getting Back to Normal

Hope you all are enjoying my mucho pictores posts. What with my mom here and all, I haven't had much time to write. She just left this morning, wah! Back to life on our own. She was here for three weeks, so we kind of got used to having her around, but I think Dad would have been a little pissed if we'd kept her any longer. Although we spent a lot of time just sitting around the house (hey, I just had a baby, remember?!), we also did more site seeing than I've done the whole year and a half I've been here. We even took a trip to Kyoto (mom and I and the baby, anyway). Although I enjoyed seeing the sites of northern Japan, Kyoto was just awesome. We didn't even get to see half of everything there is to see there. We did get to hit most of the hot spots (although we missed seeing the Imperial Palace since it is evidently closed on the weekends), and we got to be part of a real tea ceremony where they taught us how to perform it as both guest and host (where I learned that powdered green tea tastes absolutely nothing like bagged green tea and is really quite vile). We also ate a lot of green tea ice cream (which is much tastier than the tea itself) and did a bunch of shopping.

We had a great time, but there were some downsides to our trip. It was unbearably hot, Minnesota hot, in Kyoto. I (stupidly) thought it would be too much of a hassle to bring Jocelyn's stroller (which is this big monsterous thing and we were taking 3 trains to get down there), so we brought this weird sling-like contraption someone bought me for my baby shower. This is not your normal baby sling. It sits over both shoulders (it's supposed to distribute the baby's weight more evenly) with a pouch in the front. However, I neglected to note that the overall color of the sling is black and the shape of the sling keeps the baby nestled into your warm body, thus making the opening like a small oven which bakes both mom and baby so that you nearly suffer from heatstroke before you decide it isn't safe to keep the baby in there when its so hot and spend the rest of the trip manually carrying around the baby until your arms fall off. Thank god Jocelyn wasn't as big as Caitlyn or there is no way we could have made it through the whole trip. In fact, we spent a good portion of the trip looking to buy a cheap stroller or another, safer sling. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any such thing in the entire country of Japan. Even Sanwado's (the Japanese Wal-Mart) cheaped stroller was over $200. So, we suffered accordingly.

One interesting thing to note is that the Japanese appear to not bring small babies out into public. I noticed that here in Misawa, too. The youngest baby I've seen out and about had to be at least 6 months old. Everywhere we went, Jocelyn was popular than the actual attraction. People stopped us on the street to make a fuss over her. When we went to Ryonji Temple (a Zen Buddhist Temple famous for a particular type of zen rock garden), you are supposed to meditate on this rock garden and many Buddhist pilgrims go there to do just that. When we entered the garden with Jocelyn, nearly every single person gathered around us to coo over her and take her picture. It was like she was this mini-celebrity. It reminded me of when I took Caitlyn to China. She was a lot older, about 18 months, but most Chinese had never seen a white baby, not to mention the fact that Caitlyn is blond with blue eyes, so we got stopped all over the country so that people could just touch her or take her picture. So now there are multiple pictures of both my children floating around Asia!