Visitors!

We have our first non-family visitors, our friends Blaise, Adrienne, Anselm and Eliot from Seattle. I'm frankly envious of their freedom here: the freedom to travel and experience Japan as a vacation and not as a place to live and work and go to school.

But there is a side benefit. They are nudging us out of our routine. Blaine went with them today to take the kids to Mt. Takao, a short mountain that's about an hour's train ride from central Tokyo. (I was working at my magazine.) There's a cable car that takes you up to the top and some steps that Arno whined about but then conquered. They played hide and seek and had ice cream and met me at Shinjuku station with chocolate smears on their shirts. They were happy.

Another benefit of Adrienne's visit, for me, is that we're having some interesting chats about parenting. It's vastly helpful to see other parents in action, if only to show options for what we do.

I'm realizing that summer is a challenge for Lucinda, especially, because she misses the structure of regular school days, and it's a challenge for me because I like my school-hour freedom to do what I want, to read, to swim, to look around Tokyo. End result: she makes lots of demands, I end up saying "no" a lot, and we get annoyed with her more often. With parenting, you always have to find a new solution to a new problem.