Update on School and Terry's Job

The boys had their first full day today. In Michael's school they used towels brought from home to clean the classroom. Japanese school children have a long history of cleaning their own classroom. This includes sweeping, wiping things down, etc. Once a month or so, the kids use towels to clean the classroom floor by hand. They get in a bear crawl like position and run up and down the floor in rows. This promotes pride in the classroom, builds team spirit, and is an all around positive experience for the class. I really think it teaches pride for their school and makes the children think about how they treat their classroom since they have to clean it up. Tommy's class got to clean their floors yesterday and he thought it was a lot of fun. He talked about it all afternoon.

Tommy's class got to spend some time in their small vinyl pools at the school. Next week they walk 5 minutes down to Michael's school and get to use the big pool. The school drains some of the water out for the little kids. It's a great experience for the kindergarteners to play in a 25 meter pool! Tommy also got introduced to the school children and the parents today.

Michael got to go to the school library today. He checked out a book. He really likes to read. At home he is on Harry Potter 5! He really likes Harry Potter and can't wait to finish book 5 so he can start on book 6.

Michael already has homework. He has to practice all of the Chinese characters that the class has learned from the beginning of the year, which started in April. He has about 50 characters to practice this weekend. Some of them he already knows as Mio has been forcing him to practice his Chinese characters since we decided to move here.

Today's school lunch for Michael was curry. This is one of Michael's favorite meals! His first school lunch. All of the kids are required to eat the school lunch, so this makes it easy on the mothers. It's about $30 per month for school lunch.

Terry had to go to work this afternoon and sign papers, interview with some middle managers, and interview with the HR folks. Mio had to make a Japanese resume for Terry last night. This was on short notice, but Mio was up to the challenge. Terry took his Japanese resume and passport sized photo to the office and endured the Japanese interview challenge. The HR folks didn't speak any English, so Terry had to work hard. Terry's boss is American. His boss is Japanese, but speaks quite a bit of English. While Terry's boss and boss's boss helped out a lot, there were periods when only Terry and the HR guy were there. There are lots of Japanese papers to fill out. Terry and Mio will have to work on these together this weekend.

Terry starts on Tuesday, Sept. 6 by taking a 7:30 am bullet train down south to the company's show room and training facility. He'll be there all week, coming back on Saturday. Then, the 2nd week he'll be in Tokyo for training. Terry's office is about 1 hour away from home via: foot (10 minutes), train (15 minutes), train (25 minutes, foot (10 minutes). Terry will soon be getting his laptop with Japanese OS and his cell phone with Japanese OS. So, Terry will have fun trying to figure out how to do e-mail and presentations in Japanese and using his Japanese cell phone.

To celebrate, Terry stopped at the local French bakery by the train station and bought some dessert pastries. As Rachel Ray would say, they were 'Yummo!'

Tomorrow the remodelers come back to touch up and to fix some of the things we have found. Not sure what to expect when the arrive. Not sure what they will be doing and how long it will take. We think it will take more than one day, but we'll see.