Lucinda and Arno dragged Blaine out of bed to make pancakes, and within an hour, they were squabbling, shouting, screeching and driving us crazy. When will they be old enough to play by themselves in the morning?
Then Blaine told me he felt sick - and he also had to work this afternoon, which meant that I was solo-parenting for the seventh day in a row. (Blaine was in South Korea last week and took a reporting trip to Yokohama on Saturday. He is working like a dog.)
I scrambled and took the kids to a park, Hibiya Koen, near the Imperial Palace, where there was a playground we hadn't visited. It started off well: we emerged from the subway to see Tokyo's version of Nature with a pond, turtles on a rock, ducks and a German garden where several people were painting the scenery from benches.
On to the playground which, like so many Tokyo playgrounds, looks like something you'd find in Romania, circa 1978. Run-down equipment with a bit of rust, on dirt sprinkled with scrubby weeds. Not inspiring.
On the plus side, the park was the finish line for a charity 10k run, and there was a guitarist singing in English. I'd been feeling bummed out, but the kids threw themselves into playing, and pretty soon were chasing each other around.
Then they got tired and Lucinda started whining, but sometimes I can't just make it easy and take a taxi home. Instead I dragged them back to the subway and then decided I should buy groceries - which meant taking the kids into a new store where I couldn't find anything.
Soon enough, they were running down the aisles and pulling colored marshmallows off the shelves and I was hollering at them while I scrambled to buy meat and veggie. And THEN we walked home. Do you ever compound mistakes by making new ones that are just as irrational?
In Seattle, I'd arranged our family life to minimize hassles. Tokyo is more of an adventure, but sometimes it's an adventure in exhaustion.
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