The Pandemic, Part 3...

On Thursday the 26th we all worked very hard getting ready for a dinner party.  B had discovered that the only time to have the six Japanese fellows he had been working with for the last year over for supper would be that night.  I tidied the yard, and Misses A and M did a great job on the patio.  Miss R entertained our Japanese girl.  She goes to three different schools normally, and has her mom all to herself in the rare times she isn't in school.  So I don't think she knows how to entertain herself very well...

B grilled Cartagena beef kabobs, and we had elote corn casserole, salad, taco chicken, and Mexican beans made in the instant pot.  It was tasty!  The six fellows were tons of fun.  They played soccer with the girls in the back yard while B was grilling.  The visiting girl and her mom also stayed for supper, so we had quite a house full.

 We had a very fun dinner, finding out about the doctors, their families, and  their hopes for the future.  They almost all want to go study more in the US.  This girl had this shirt, which I found very amusing.  She had never read it before.  We taught them all about rodeos, rodeo clowns, and rodeo crowns.  We asked them about their favorite places to visit in Japan.

The fellows sent lots of pictures that they took of the evening.

Late that night, the Stomach Bug struck.  Miss M was first, and she had it bad...  A solid 24 hours of straight vomiting, misery, and sleeping.  

Miss R was next, on Saturday.  She didn't seem to have it quite as bad.  Less vomiting, slightly shorter duration.  Miss A had her turn on Sunday, and  then B and I both got it on Monday.  It was horrible!  I had a good long non puking streak, all gone.

But man did it feel wonderful to feel better after it was over.  I had extra strong sympathy for all the poor people sick with illnesses and viruses.  I feel so blessed that I am rarely sick!

The Pandemic, Part 2...

We started home school, for the two that weren't already home schooled, on Monday, the 23rd.  Miss A had to design her child by flipping a coin for a science assignment, which is above.  We have had, so far, a half week and a full week of virtual school.  We have had two opposite experiences.  Miss R's class seems to be going great.  Her teacher does daily meetings on google classrooms.  The kids get on 15 minutes before her, so they all talk and mess around together.  I feel like this has been so helpful!  R gets to see and hear her school friends, and it seems so normal the way they interact together.  I think any vestige of normalcy we can cling to is super helpful for these kids.  Anyway, the teacher goes over the assignments that are given that day.  The assignments are all fairly clearly labeled on the google classroom page.  R clicks on them, and does them.  Some are some pretty dumb slide show things that are probably put out by the school for the whole third grade to do.  Others are games from abcya, math man, spelling city, and the like.  Miss R has fun doing them, and her teacher is available for video chat for a couple hours, so she usually has a question of some sort, probably just an excuse to get to talk to Miss Lewis.  So for R, virtual school has been fun and something she can do pretty much on her own.  I make her do science and history with Miss M, and sometimes language arts and beast academy for math.  I (kind of) make her keep a reading log, and we have lots of other chores and tasks on the charts where I keep track of their days. 

For Miss A, virtual school has been frustrating and stressful.  Her seventh grade team is based on schoology, instead of google classrooms.  I don't know if that's the problem or what.  But I haven't noticed any video teaching going on.  She just had assignments with due dates.  The problem has been turning them in.  Some teachers don't get email at home, so any assignments she emailed in got marked incomplete.  For a couple days, we couldn't get our scanner to work, so we took pictures of her papers with my phone, and tried to send those in.  But the teachers didn't like those.  She did one set of science worksheets three times, and they still show up on her grades as incompletes.  It has been a mess!  So much so that we are probably going to pull her out to just home school.  This week, currently, is spring break.  We have been doing straight home school this week (I know it's spring break, but we're locked in our house!  I figure we may as well do school...) and she seems to like it well enough.  Rumor is that they are not likely to return to school this school year.   So why force her to wade through all the technical difficulties? 

The week of the 23rd we were babysitting an eight year old Japanese girl who's mom works with B.  Again, I sent them all out to the playground as much as possible to soak in the sun and fresh air.  At that point we still hadn't heard of any virus around base.  I could just tell from the panicked news back in the states that we were going to tighten up restrictions here any day.  On Tuesday, the 24th, B came home from work.  I had made a new batch of soda bread, and I had the leftover colcannon (I made quite a vat of on Saturday, since I had free potato scrubbing...) all warmed up and ready for supper.

But B had heard that a restriction to stay on base was in the works, and if so, he wanted one last visit to Hamazushi first.  I messaged his xo's wife to see if she knew anything, and she answered she didn't officially, but that her family was currently out in town eating out, if that helped.  So we went out for sushi.   Colcannon can wait.

 As usual, A was extremely daring.  Even tried cuttlefish.

 R sticks with ramen.  Although we ordered her some "hamburg" sushi.

 

 M is deliberate in her sushi choices, but still daring.  I stick with my favorite smoked duck with onion and mayo.  Yummmm!  We stopped by the fabric store as well.  Interestingly enough, we stocked up on elastic!  I thought we might need scrunchy making supplies.  Now we are using it to sew face masks. 

The next day I continued with the theme of "hurry and get anything you need off base before the word comes officially that we are trapped" and walked to Homes. 

I bought a few more plants, went one last time to my beloved Daiso...  Stopped at Umikaze park to look at the tulips.  Goodbye Japan!  I'll miss you!

The Pandemic, Part 1....

It has been quite a ride!  When the covid-19 virus started swirling around China, people here in Japan seemed to show mild concern.  One heard the stories of the emergency stop switch being pulled on trains if someone sneezed, that sort of thing.  I honestly thought they would be more freaked out by it all. They are famously hypochondriac!  And the Diamond Princess was sitting just off shore here close in Yokohama, with people being fed to the virus in a classic case of epic mismanagement.  But really, although Japanese schools got cancelled, no one seemed to change their behavior much.   No cases were reported on base, and few seemed to be happening in the rest of Japan.  I think everyone was desperate to maintain normalcy for the Olympics?  It sort of seemed like no one wanted people to be tested, because no one wanted to know the results of the tests...

On base, people started to panic buy toilet paper, but nothing else seemed really to change.  Our church and church activities were among the first things to close down.  Kind of freaky!  Then a smattering of other closures, which were honestly a bit frustrating.  Because if you're not closing school, why cancel the middle school strings concert, and reading night, and other things?  I was ready for school to be canceled long before they actually did it.  I have a full year's worth of curriculum for all three girls, so I figured I was ready.  In other ways I started getting ready.  My friend Nicki mentioned a few months ago, "How is your pantry?  Are you ready if this gets bad?"  And I wasn't at all!  So I started picking up extras, and thankfully got as prepared as you easily can in a smallish sort of house.  All carried, of course, in the valiant stroller B converted into a shopping cart.  We call her Sashiko, because I name everything.

The second big change for us, after church being cancelled, was the sudden end of swim team.  Nicki and I took the girls for a private swim team, coached by Miss A, the day after that happened. 

 Here is SN and NF in front, with Miss R and AW in back.

 

 Miss A tried to corral them all, but the little girls didn't last long before they went to swim for fun.  Miss A and Miss M lasted for a pretty good workout.  Although not the hour and a half three or four days a week they were getting from swim team. 

This was all the week of March 16th.  And that week they finally called off school.  B and I took a long Friday walk way past Homes to some thrift stores I had been wanting to check out.  We thought we better take advantage of only having one girl home for one last day.  The thrift stores were fun.  B found a nice woodworking folding bench, which I carted home on my stroller.  Along with the plants and other stuff we got at Homes (which is like a Home Depot, but... louder.)  We stopped at a new sushi place for lunch, Kappa Sushi, which had orders delivered by mini Shinkansens.  Super cute!  We also passed a beautiful jade plant in bloom.  I had never seen one bloom before.

That Saturday we celebrated St. Patrick's Day.  I made the girls spend the entire day out being wild at the playground, anticipating that we would, perhaps, soon not be allowed out.  I cooked an Irish feast.  I was surprised by the girls and their friends being desperate to scrub the colcannon potatoes.  They actually lined up for the honor.  I was happy to leave them to it!

 Miss R and her friend LF made me a lovely arrangement of sakura blossoms tied onto a stick. 

 We had three adults and seven girls, and one dog, for our St. Patrick's meal of corned beef, colcannon, salad, soda bread (that disappeared very quickly), and fruit rainbows in a bowl because I was too lazy to form them into actual rainbows.  The girls watched Luck of the Irish.  Selma cleaned the floor.  Even with all the company, B was still the only male present.

That was the last week of kind of normal!