...only a couple of days late.

we had a nice christmas day, for the most part. yoshi had to work, and i got up at about 6:30 and enjoyed the quiet. i got more quiet time than usual, because the kids didn't come downstairs til nearly eight! that was nice. after everyone had come downstairs, we opened presents. i was relieved because hiro didn't seem to notice that he didn't get a RC car. phew! he got a bat and ball, a glove and ball, some flat blocks (this is hard to explain, but his school has something similar and i thought he'd like it. his are colored, quite nice.) and the video, kung-fu panda. sasha got a doll's trunk and doll clothes, a race car (you shake it to make it go. it's pink, she loves it!), and a fairy doll house. tommy got a wooden fire engine, a bamboo game, and a wooden puzzle. basically the kids got a present from grandma & grampa, mommy & daddy, and santa. my sister also gave them a couple of videos (jungle book and snow white) and they are besotted with snow white (SCORE! more quiet time for me!) and my mom sent them a game they can all play. the kids had fun opening their presents, and didn't even notice the stockings (i hung them up next to the tree, on a little bookshelf we have.) there were little things there, basically candy and light-up toys.

then it was breakfast time. i remember last year i wanted pancakes and took everyone to royal host, but this year they were more interested in DVDs so we watched a couple of them instead, and i think breakfast was mikan, three musketeers and twix. oops! then, because we were watching videos, we were late getting to the school for sasha's uniform fitting! oops again! it was ok, though, because they weren't so busy (we were #22 even though we were nearly thirty minutes 'late') and it's christmas, right? but then, we were supposed to pay ¥20,000 (about $200) for whatever reason, and i only had ¥5,000. oops #3! LOL good thing we already have a child at the school....sasha got a present from santa (whom i suspect was enchosensei, the 'principal'), which was a towel, and tommy and hiro got a little thing, too. then the sports teacher met us in the parking lot (hiro has an extra sports class on fridays, i think it's like gymnastics for babies) and friday was a make-up day for when the teacher was sick earlier in the month. oops #4! (i'm getting tired of all these oops!!) but he was very nice and gave hiro a gift (which he gave all the students--a whistle on a keitai strap) and actually gave us a couple more for sasha and tommy. oh joy (please feel my utter non-excitement in that statement.) i do not give my children noise-making toys. the drive home was not so fun.

actually, on the way home, i took the kids to joyfull. tommy promptly fell asleep on the bench seat. uh, yeah, he had a fever and wasn't feeling well. happy christmas! the rest of us had lunch, then we went home and tommy slept some more. during the afternoon it went up pretty high, so at 4:30 i hustled everyone into the car and got to the clinic just before it closed. had a flu swab, but no flu (and it may have been too early to know for sure, but the next day he was just fine, so probably not flu), we got some medicine (which he refuses to take *sigh*) and got everyone back home.

i may have had a lot of oops that day, but the most aggravating thing was the chicken. yoshi has ordered some food from the farming lecture we did this past year. basically organic food, and you can order in advance for the whole year. so, yoshi has ordered brown rice and eggs, and a couple other things (mochi, maybe?) and some chicken, and some duck. the chicken was supposed to come in december, and i asked if we could get a whole chicken. yoshi arranges it and we expect our chicken to come (IIRC, it was supposed to come last week!), but it never did. yoshi would ask them, and they would say it would come such and such day, but no chicken. finally, they said it would come, for sure, on the 25th. and it did, while we were at the kindergarten. *sigh* so i call the delivery guy and arrange for it to come after five. but then, i had to take tommy to the clinic, so i called the delivery company, asked them to delay it a bit more, then got all the doctor stuff out of the way. finally, at 6 or 6:30, the delivery comes. the chicken? in pieces. we got a thigh and a breast, and a 'gara', which is basically the bones, for making stock. good thing i had already decided NOT to do a big dinner this year and wasn't depending on that chicken! instead i made pork stew, which was very good. *sigh* next year, turkey!

sorry, no photos, the ones i took are really poor, plus the shoji in the tatami room, where the tree is, is all shredded to hell, and looks awful! LOL