This is Leia Rose's very good friend Yukino and her Mamma, Hiroko. Leia Rose met Yukino at Artgarden Montessori last year, and they soon became fast friends. Yukino and her family are now moving back to Japan. : ( We are sure going to miss them! Luckily, Leia Rose and Yukino are going to be pen-pals! Their relationship is certainly a testament to friendship across cultural barriers.
It's so nice to see Annie in the thick of things! You can see the tent in the background where most of the playing took place today. There was lots of camping, cooking and rescuing going on!
Yukino has always been quite taken with Annie, ever since she was born. : ) And even though Annie was asleep when Yukino first arrived, Yukino wasted no time playing with Annie as soon as she woke up! : )
The only issue we had was with our scarves, actually. They belonged to Leia Rose's Great Great Great Grandmother, and we keep them in a cedar chest for dress-up. Well, the second Leia Rose got them out poor Yukino broke out in hives, started scratching, and coughing! Yukino is allergic to dust, . . . and it was so bad with the scarves that she had to take a shower! Poor Yukino!
It was just a wonderful visit. I always learn so much from Hiroko. She worries about the language barrier, I think, but we do just fine talking! I think she speaks English very well. I think the only comment that really surprised me was when Hiroko said, "The dead come back in August." The bluntness of that statement startled me so much that I laughed. Hiroko was actually talking about the specifics of a particular festival (I think). She was looking at a book of Leia's called Suki's Kimono, and how interesting it was to see some errors in it! The biggest "confusion," she said, was that there were not only paper lanterns as decorations but also fish (I don't know what to call them), windsocks. She said there is one festival for girls and one for boys. The fish (which I believe she said were masculine symbols) were decorated only on the boy holiday. Interesting. As for Leia Rose and I surprising the Mori family, they had never seen a Johnny Jump Up or a Scratch-and-Sniff book either. Hiroko made us a wonderfully authentic Japanese lunch, . . . complete with chopsticks! Leia liked the lunch, . . . except I think she was disappointed that the only piece of food that was pink (her favorite color) tasted like fish. Probably the biggest laugh we had was when I told her how well she spoke in her e-mails. And she offered that her husband "helped" with those. "You cheated!" I told her. And we both laughed. She also said that Americans (and I told her specifically Southerners) always greet eachother with a "hi" or a "hey" or a "hello," and no one even makes eye contact in Japan. She said that people will think both herself and Yukino strange as they stroll down a typical Japanese city block and say "hey" to people. : ) Leia Rose just loves Yukino. She was so distraught at the prospect of saying goodbye at the end that she shut herself in her room for a while. I had never seen her act that way before. Leia Rose will really miss her! And although I'm sure there were times when Hiroko and I really couldn't understand each other (like when I was interested in hearing what she "didn't like" about the US, I don't think she knew what I meant), we had a wonderful time as well. In fact, it seems as though both Hiroko and Yukino has just as much fun as we did. Hiroko wrote me a note saying, among other things, that "We enjoyed today very much. I am guessing it could be one of the best memory of staying in US."
I can't tell you how much that means to me!
1 comment:
That's awesome!! :) But very sad that they're moving away.
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