The Jennifer Blogs

This is the time of year my friends and family all send me those letters that allow me to look back with them on where they've been and what they've done in 2007. I've enjoyed reading them and am grateful to those of you who've shared with me. However, I'm not going to do it. 

For one thing, I have two children and with that comes a certain degree of memory loss. As a parent, I look forward to losing bits and pieces of my memory. It's far better to forget things than to remember all the crap they've put you through the past year. For another thing, I have two children and with that comes a certain … oh wait, I think I may have said that already.



Another reason is the only significant thing that really occurred this year was our move to a foreign country. How on else am I going to entertain you with the things that happened in January through September?



So instead, I present to you A LOOK AHEAD. Here's what we know will be happening in 2008. I'm sure there will be much more to add to this list, and maybe at the end of 2008 I'll have it all written down so that the stuff I've forgotten will be in print and I can send out one of those retrospective letters myself.



January:

1: New Year's Day. The Japanese will be celebrating the Year of the Mouse. Or maybe it's a Rat. It looks like a mouse.


8: We will be traveling from the US back to Japan after an extended holiday visit with friends and family. 


17: Marso is taking the day off work so we can all enjoy a tour of the sumo stables. We will also be allowed to watch the sumo wrestlers practice for about an hour.




February:

1: Jen turns 36. Mighty close to 40.



March:
We are supposed to be in Singapore by April. The operative word here is "by." That means we will need to be moving sometime in March. This will be a busy month for us as we search for the perfect place to live for the next two years of our lives. We'll be looking for a place with a gym and a pool. Singapore is HOT. 

I'm excited that some friends of ours from Louisiana – the Despinos – will probably be joining us for this adventure. Chad will likely be accepting a position with the company for the Singapore part of the project.




April:

23: Jean-Luc turns 15. I'll lose more memory.

By now we hope to have found a church in Singapore where we can serve in areas where God has gifted us. Ideally it will also have an excellent youth ministry so Jean-Luc and D'Ette can also get involved.

We will also have the kids enrolled in Tae Kwon Do and/or gymnastics in Singapore. There was no place to put them in Japan because none of the schools we found offered instruction in English.




May:

11: Marso and I will celebrate our eighth year of marriage. I'm going to ask for a puppy.


13: Marso turns 52. Mighty close to 40. (that's what we're telling him) If I didn't get a puppy for our anniversary, I will give Marso one for his birthday.




June:

13: The kids' last day of school




July:
We'd like to take a summer vacation. Maybe Australia.




August:

31: I will be so skinny you won't recognize me.




September:

2: Marso and I celebrate our eighth anniversary again. That's the beauty of going to the justice of the peace before the altar. You get two anniversaries!


8: The kids start their second year at Laurel Springs School.


28: D'Ette becomes a teenager. I will lose more memory, more money, and at this point Marso and I may be the dumbest we've ever been.




October:
We have friends who have promised to come see us in Singapore. This might be the best time of the year to come. Singapore is very tropical year-round, but it will probably be best to come during winter months, even though there's no such thing as "winter" in Singapore. Kind of like Florida.




November:
There's a lot to be thankful for, and it's on Thanksgiving Day every year that I make the kids write down a list of things for which they are thankful. Maybe in 2008 we will be beat out "Jacob Petro" on Jean-Luc's list. In 2007, Jacob was 10 while Marso, D'Ette and I didn't even make the Top 50.




December:

25: Our friends the Bigsbys will come to Singapore to use their timeshare and spend Christmas with us.

That means "My name is Jen" in Japanese. Beyond that, I can't speak a whole lot of Japanese. 

I can order chicken rice, not that I want to. The chicken is too fatty and is quite often dark meat (I prefer white meat). 

I can answer the phone ("moshi moshi"). 

I can say Thank You (arigato), Good evening (kon bon wa), and count from 1 to 10. That's about it.



So when the phone rang the other day and a Japanese woman started talking to me, I was certain she had the wrong telephone number. She asked me at one point, in English, if I speak Japanese. I told her in English, "Very, very little." So she kept trying to get her point across to me in English. I just knew she was going to try to sell me something, but I finally figured out she was delivering something to my house and wanted to make sure I would be home and would have the cash for the C.O.D.



I think a lot of Japanese people speak more English than they let on. It's my opinion they are worried that if they start to speak a little English that I will assume they must know a lot of English. That's precisely why I don't try to speak Japanese. I just know they are going to think, "Oh, good! She speaks Japanese." Then they will go on and on and on in Japanese and I will be left standing there with question marks over my head.



Those who do speak pretty good English like to practice on us, though. Tonight on the subway D'Ette sat next to a Japanese man who looked to be in his 40s (which means he's probably 70 - they look so GOOD over here!). He told her that her brother looks like Harry Potter and that her father looks like Santa Claus! 

I had to laugh out loud! Although Jean-Luc might be able to pass in Japan as Harry Potter (minus the British accent and magic wand), my husband looks NOTHING like Santa Claus! (I did, however, use that as an excuse to tell him he'd better back away from the all-you-can-eat curry buffet he's been frequenting on his lunch breaks). 



Before we came here I had these visions of taking Japanese lessons. However, as difficult as it is to learn this language, by the time we leave I will only just be figuring out the basics. I spoke with a friend of mine the other day (Beth). She is an American living in Tokyo. She has been here 10 years and agrees that I won't be here long enough for it to be worth my time taking Japanese lessons. So for now I will learn a few key phrases and when I don't know what someone is saying to me I will look at them quizzically, like they look at me when they don't know what I'm saying.



Still, it would be nice to communicate with those people here who I am growing fond of. Strange, but I really love the girl at the dry cleaners. I found out her name tonight, but I will spare myself the embarrassment of trying to spell it. She speaks very little English, and all I can say to her that she understands is "nori" (starch). I also really like the people at Starbucks. They stopped and talked to Beth and me the other evening for several minutes. Beth had to translate where she could, but I would loved to have been able to talk to them as well. They were so friendly and genuinely nice people.



I know we're leaving here this March to head to Singapore for two years, but if God allows us to come back to Tokyo, I want to come back -- and next time maybe I'll be here long enough to learn the language.

If I had known as a girl the things I know today about boys, I would probably have entered a convent. Well, first I'd have had to convert to Catholicism. But that's beside the point.



Raising a teenage boy has shed so much light onto things. Every day I ask Jean-Luc, "Did you put deodorant on?" The answer is always the same, "No." Every day I have to remind him to comb his hair, wash his face, brush his teeth. All that wouldn't be such a big deal except that he's 14. He should have this hygiene thing figured out by now.



So tonight I asked him to brush his teeth before he went to bed. Exasperated I said, "Please brush your teeth at least ONCE this week." He shot back at me, "This isn't the first time I've brushed my teeth this week." So I said, "Okay, so brush them for the second time." His response? "I've brushed my teeth three times this week!" And he seemed so proud. Three times this week. And it's only Friday night. I guess I should be happy.

I love Christmas. Growing up in upstate NY meant there was always snow on Christmas. When I was a kid I didn't appreciate the snow and the cold weather like I do now. I guess you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

That, and living in Florida for so many years has given me proper perspective. It's just not supposed to be 80 degrees on Christmas Day.



My favorite gift as a kid was the dollhouse Santa brought me when I was about 7 years old. It wasn't big enough for my Barbie dolls to live in, but I did have these neat little cornhusk dolls that fit in there perfectly. The Cornhusk Family.

My little brother Charlie loved his boy toys, but he also seemed to get great enjoyment out of my dollhouse. Mom told me that when I was gone to a friend's house or at school, Charlie would play with my dolls in my house all day long. Mom would realize the house was really quiet, so she'd go in search of the boy. There he was – in the middle of my floor – playing with my dollhouse and The Cornhusk Family.



The only problem with Charlie playing with my dollhouse was that he wasn't careful enough. I was much more cautious than he was with the handling of my fragile cornhusk dolls. (Okay, maybe not fragile, but certainly not as well made as the plastic Barbie dolls.) Every time I would let Charlie play with them, one of the Cornhusk family would end up beheaded. I'm not sure why I let him continue playing with them, but I did, and eventually I had a family of headless cornhusk dolls.



I eventually lost interest in the dollhouse when I had nobody to live in it. But, just because I stopped playing with it didn't mean I didn't still want it. It just sat there in the corner of my room, not being used. I guess Mom took that to mean it wasn't important to me.



Right before Christmas a few years later, Mom had a brilliant idea. She was going to get filthy rich off my dad. She was going to have him make dollhouses and she would sell them. I have no idea who she was going to sell them to or how she was going to sell them. But I did know how she was going to make them. She was going to put a pattern together so my dad could make them. Because she didn't have a pattern readily available, she took my dollhouse apart. She told me she would be very careful and that she would put it back together again.



So down came the walls. The floors were removed. The roof came off. Our dining room table had wood everywhere. Thing is, Mom wasn't sure which piece of wood went where. It all looked so much alike.



Mom never could figure out how to make a pattern, so Dad never built her any dollhouses to sell. Of course, that means Mom didn't get filthy rich in the Dollhouse Business. I never got my dollhouse put back together either. But we had a great fire that night.

I'm really enjoying this book I'm reading - A Girl Named Zippy. It's a memoir from a person you don't know. A person I don't know. Still, I'm enjoying her stories. She paints very vivid pictures, and makes me recall my own life growing up in Small Town, NY. (No, it's not really called "Small Town.")



I remember our kitchen smelling like apples. My mom used to look forward to the fall because that's when she would go to Roger Marris' apple orchard and ask if she could pick apples. She worked a regular job as a Lab Technologist at the hospital, but there was something about picking stuff that my mom loved. She would pick whatever was in season, and she loved it. Not for the money, mind you. She just loved pickin' stuff. And I do believe apple season was her favorite. (Is it offensive to anyone that I believe my mom should have been born Mexican?)



One of the perks of picking apples is that at the end of the day, before she came down from the ladder one last time, Mom would fill her basket with apples to bring home. I learned at a young age how to tell the difference between Red Delicious and Empire and Golden Delicious and Granny Smith. I knew what all the apples were called, and I knew what they all tasted like. And I loved the way they made our kitchen smell!



Now in Tokyo I look out the windows and I see the leaves turning gold and red and orange, and I watch them fall off the trees. If I open the door and feel the cold air, I can sometimes in my memory also smell those apples.