All hope, all ye babies who enter here?
Our baby has finally (at the age of 9 months) shown signs of crawling. Or at least turning around and scuttling backward, then turning around again. She can also sit on her own (with occasional falls to either side, depending on how quickly she turns her head), and last week she managed to grab onto objects in order to pull herself forward a few inches.
It’s time, we thought. Better get the baby barricade.
Last Saturday, I got my first taste of feeding the baby by myself…er…I should say that my baby got her taste of my feeding her.
My wife wanted to do a little shopping, and also needed to get new contact lenses, so I stayed with our daughter for about four hours. I’d done this before, of course, but when our baby was much younger. I had also fed her before, but only when my wife was also present. Starting around late October, we started giving our daughter ri-nyushoku, or “separate from breastfeeding meals” (i.e., baby food).
Get set, ready, fling!
Actually, there are four distinct time periods identified in Japanese for babies learning how to eat solid food, each with an onomatopoeic label: “Gokkun (swallowing whole) Period,” “Mogu-mogu (gumming) Period,” “Kami-kami (chewing) Period,” and “Paku-paku (gobbling) Period.” Our daughter is about to get her first teeth, so she’s on the border of “mogu-mogu” and “kami-kami.”
Now, I thought I was all prepared for this. I have many younger brothers and sisters. Even before I was high school age, I had plenty of practice at changing diapers and putting clothing on my siblings. I had even helped feed a few of them.
No problem, I thought, feeling sure of myself. I can handle this.
Yeah. Famous last words.
This weekend was a three-day weekend in Japan. Monday was “Coming of Age Day” (成人の日), which is when cities around the country hold ceremonies to inform those who have turned 20 years old of what it means to be a “member of society” (社会人). The ceremony typically involves young people dressed in expensive kimono and suits, long-winded boring speeches by politicians, and then heavy drinking afterward (some of which have turned into near-riots in cities such as Kochi in recent years—although these incidents are often not reported in English-language websites).
Anyway, my wife and I celebrated the holiday like most people who have a three-day weekend: we went to the mall.
AEON operates several malls in our area (and always seems to be opening more, despite the business climate), but even the nearest one is about a a twenty-minute drive. Not wanting to drive on a holiday, we took the train instead. Living on a major train has many benefits, but one of the biggest is having an elevator from the ticket gates to the train platform. Luckily, the law was changed a few years ago virtually requiring that train stations with a certain number of average passengers build an elevator for barrier-free access (there are still a surprisingly large number of train stations, public buildings, and pedestrian walkway areas with no barrier-free access at all).
Of course, we had to change trains, but it’s a small price to pay for a cheap $6 per person round trip train ride. The baby, of course, is free. We brought her in the baby stroller. We first wrapped her in a blanket, but as it turned out she actually started to sweat through her wool cap. We eventually even unzipped her winter jumper to cool her down. She was smiling and gurgling happily at a few older women who talked to her on the train. Good news, since she was extremely afraid before New Years even to look at strangers.
It was as we were transferring to another line and were taking an elevator down to the the train platform that I heard the word.
“Half.”
The Japan Times Mainichi Shimbun
Taking Leave 