Bat's trees and guana tails

Very long time no post! I am going to try to set aside time to post something each week from now- even though there are not so many momentous happenings in the life of RG, it's the little things I want to remember!

Now that he is talking a lot (not as well as some of the kids we know, but pretty much on par with others the same age), he occasionally comes out with some funny little things. He has a decent collection of battery operated trains, which eventually run down of course. When this happens, he will call out "Mummy! Bat's trees!" It took me a while at first to realise that bat's trees = batteries, but I'm sure it makes sense to him, especially after we saw lots of bats in trees in Australia in December!

You might be wondering what guana tails are- we were at an Okinawan restaurant on the weekend, and Riku started up one of his current favourite pastimes- asking "What's this?" about everything in sight. He asked about his papa's lunch (noo-noos, i.e. noodles) and then mine, which was an Okinawan dish called goya champuru (will find a picture to illustrate or this post won't make sense to anyone not familiar with goya!)

I told him what it was, but he came back with "No, no goya! Guana tails!" I'm surprised I managed to figure out what he has saying, actually, but I realised he meant it looked like a pile of iguana tails, which it does, if you think about it. That might seem random, but one of his phonics DVDs has an "i-i-itchy iguana" in it, so he has some idea what iguanas look like. Anyway, just something I wanted to note down for posterity! I'm amazed sometimes by how vivid an imagination he has- clearly all the TV he's watched hasn't destroyed it, despite all the dire warnings you hear!

Re-purposing

At 2 years 7.5 months Riku still hates to have his hair washed. I don't think there has been one time in his life that Riku has had a hair-wash free of yelling- he just does not like to have water poured or sprayed over his head. I bought a "shampoo hat" in the vague hope that he would wear it and it would make him happier about having his hair washed, but no such luck.

He has, however, found another use for the hat:

He thinks he looks lovely :)

Long overdue post!

It's about time for an update in the life and times of Riku! He keeps me so busy these days that I find myself pretty tired once I've put him to bed and tidied away the aftermath of a day of playing in the living room and kitchen, and although I often think about it, I never manage to get as far as posting something.

I will try to write a few proper updates on various things soon- language development, eating, likes and dislikes etc, but for now here are some photos of the things Riku has been doing lately:

This is an Ikea storage box- Riku decided that with the addition of a cushion it made a great place to lie down for a couple of minutes!

He can now hold on to the swing and be pushed- Mummy is a bit scared to push him very high though!

Blue! Blue!

Boy in the bubble- finally getting to play at the park with friends again after his hand, foot and mouth disease quarantine 

Riku and the spider lilies

One big piece of news for anyone who has read this far- Riku now weighs 12.15kg!!! He amazed me by suddenly shooting up from about 10.8 to 11.5 just a few weeks ago, and he has put on more than half a kilo since then! It took so long to reach the 11kg mark that I thought it would be quite a while before we saw 12kg, but here we are :)

Hand, foots and mouse...

The next in the childhood illness line-up for us has been hand, foot and mouth disease (or as Riku says, hand, foots and mouse). I hadn't heard of this until after Riku was born, and it seems like it is a relatively new illness (first reported in the 1950s), and probably also another one like roseola that people my age probably had as kids, but nobody had a name for it so it was just a "fever and rash".

There's a high probability Mister Riku picked this up at daycare, since he started showing symptoms 3 days after being there, and we had a phone call from them to say that several kids there had come down with it in the last week. Luckily he had a pretty mild dose- the fever ranged between 38 and 39 degrees, but it didn't slow him down too much, and the rash (like tiny blisters) wasn't very extensive and didn't seem to be very itchy. In the worst case I have heard kids can have blisters in their mouths which stop them wanting to eat or drink anything, but Riku only had a couple of dots inside his lip that I could see, and was eating more or less normally.

Looking under the weather here, but actually he only lay down for about 10 minutes and soon had the forehead-cooling sheet off!

Spots on his hands and feet soon after they started appearing. It got worse than this and spread all up his legs and to his nappy area as well, but didn't really seem to bother him.

Unfortunately we had to keep Riku home from both a craft playgroup that I was supposed to be running (a friend took over), and a friend's birthday party, but never mind! At least we didn't pass it on to anyone that I know of, and also none of the adults in the house caught it either, so I'm guessing we have all had it before and have some immunity.

One side effect of the illness that we are starting to see is peeling skin on his feet and hands. I'm hoping this won't progress to another fairly common effect which is losing the toenails and sometimes fingernails- if it does happen it probably won't be for another month or more yet, according to what I've read.

Anyway, hopefully that will be the last we see of that illness! I had been worried about it since I had heard of kids really suffering with the blisters in their mouths, but it turned out to be not so bad.

Can you see the resemblance?

Here is Riku's first recognisable drawing of a face:

It's me, apparently- I am flattered, kind of! To Riku it must look exactly like me because he saw the photo on my phone a couple of days after drawing it and said "Oh, Mama!"

After I took this photo he added eyebrows and a hat to it and told me it was now a policeman :)

Hot, hot, hot...

We have been having a record-breaking heatwave this last week, with temps up to 38 degrees during the day, and the hottest overnight low ever recorded in Tokyo on Sunday morning, 30.7 degrees. I put Riku's room thermometer out on the deck in the shade on Saturday, and this was the result:

It probably could have gone higher, but had reached the limit! It was far more humid than 25%, probably between 60-70%, but for some reason the hygrometers on these things break really easily. Quite sure the thermometer part was accurate though, it was very very hot!

Riku seems to take after his dad more than me, and other than a bit of heat rash (much less than last year thankfully), he doesn't seem bothered by the heat much at all. Yesterday though when we got home from summer school (will do a post on that soon), he stripped off, headed straight out to the deck and lay down in his paddling pool, so he must have been feeling it a bit! I haven't got any photos of him lying in the pool, just these ones of him trying to squirt me with the pump:

Looks like this weather will continue through most of August- glad we have our new deck to create some shade and put the paddling pool on!

Rainy day

We haven't had many rainy days this summer, but it rained on and off most of Wednesday this week, so Riku got a chance to wear his boots, poncho and rain hat and go jumping in puddles for the first time in a while!