Cinderella Park

We really went out of our way to find this supposedly awesome park. When I bought the Funcargo, the lady left a park book in it that another military wife had written, and I've been using that to find new parks to explore. The only problem is the book is probably 10 years old, and the directions seem to be a little outdated or just plain wrong. We never did find the ambiguous white wall that marked our turn, but we somehow ended up in the right parking lot. On top of that, lots of the parks seem to be in a state of disrepair, so they're never quite as cool as I think they will be! I wanted to find this castle for Addie, and it was a great view of both the oceans, but not much more than that. There was supposed to be another cool looking tunnel structure here as well, but it was long since gone. We walked along lots of nice, woodsy, paved trails trying to find it though. 

Jose pushed her up here to play Rapunzel. It wasn't as high as it looks. :0

Jose gets stuck in the doorway. 

More Park

After she spent some time getting rejected by her little friends :) she finally gave up and found her way to the little water feature in the park and had fun dipping her fingers in and sitting on the rocks. The high temperatures are starting to dominate our days here, so our outdoor outings might be few and far between very soon. The humidity is starting to remind me of San Antonio and Pensacola. It's not unbearable, but coming from dry SoCal, it's definitely sticky and makes for awesome hair days. ;) 

Japanese Kids & the Language Barrier

We tried out another park the other week. Going to neighborhood parks has been good because there are usually some Japanese kids there who A. tries to interact with. At this park, a van full of kids had just pulled up. At first A. just watched them from a distance, and then she gradually worked her way closer and closer to them and started following them around. She stands out like a sore thumb, and even more when she opens her mouth. The kids treat her like a novelty and an outsider at the same time. She had her own ideas about what to play, and she was talking a mile a minute to them trying to get them to play along with her. A few of the boys turned and looked at her like she was from another planet before returning to their own games. After a few minutes, she turned to me and moaned, "Mommy, they're just not listening to me!" I reminded her that the kids speak a different language here so they can't understand us, and that we have to do our best to speak their language. We had just been doing some Japanese lessons on the drive, so I suggested she try to say what she knew to them. She wasn't quite ready for that though, so eventually she just kept with her following and decided that chattering away in English would be just as good. Some of the boys started mimicking her, although she didn't know they were doing that. When she went to the swings, these 2 little girls followed us over and were doing the same thing. These kids were probably 4-6 years old, which is definitely different than having 2 year olds from other cultures playing together, or even 12 year olds. These kids were just at the age to realize that there are differences and not know quite the right way to react. I wasn't offended that they seemed to be making fun of my kid, but it did give me more motivation to help us learn some Japanese quicker. We are still debating the options for preschool here. The Japanese preschools are held every day from about 9-3, and I'm not ready for that :). There are a few American preschools that do some culture lessons, but there are still lots of factors we are taking into account - driving times, costs, what we're actually looking for in a preschool, etc. So for now we're taking our time and doing lots of activities at home. One of my big goals is to get us out in town as much as possible so we get as much "culture" as possible. 

I love this picture because it shows them "checking each other out".  

The kids really thought it was funny hearing her talk. I don't know what they were saying about us, but they definitely thought hearing another language was funny. They do start learning English from a young age here, although in the Japanese class I just took, the teacher said that not many people actually know English because of the "boring, grammatical" way that it is taught, as well as their lack of practice with native speakers. 

This park had seen better days, as I'm sure all their parks have. I heard Japan is in even greater debt than America, so upkeep of parks is probably low on their list of priorities!

Treehouse Park

I found our way to another park the other day on the one day of sunshine last week. Treehouse Park looked like fun, and A. had did have fun climbing up the 3 big trees. There was a long, wobbly wooden bridge connecting 2 of the trees, but being overly cautious, I didn't let her try it because the gaps in between the logs were big enough to swallow her whole leg. :) They had a fun tunnel that you could crawl through and pop up in different places, too. Good way to get the kids nice and dirty! And as you can see below, she just loved the quad bike-go'round toy. I thought it was a clever idea, making all the kids pedal to have some fun. We were the only ones at the park though, so maybe it would've been more fun without slow Mom trying to pedal for both of us. D. just liked crawling in the sand and trying to eat dry leaves. This park is pretty close to our home, so we might have to re-visit it once we've checked out all the other ones. :)