Friends...

We are lucky, I met H when I was pregnant with Ebi-kun, she was equally as round and uncomfortable as she was pregnant with her second, the boys were due about the same time but Ebi-kun was a week early and H-kun hung around for a couple of weeks so there is about 3 weeks between them. They came over to play on Wednesday and the weather was lovely so I tried out the new oven and made pizza, the kids ate theirs outside.

Then yesterday we had a playgroup play date. I recently moved the group from Yahoo over to Facebook and in doing that we have found ourselves some new members, yesterday we met three new families along with some of the old ones. The kids have all grown up together so there is no awkwardness when they meet, they just get straight into it and off to play. We basically have two rules with the playgroup, the first is that all the members are raising their children to be bilingual Japanese/English and that when we meet as a group only English is used.

In a country where those who are different stick out like a sore thumb, it is great for the kids to know that they are not weird or anything and that there are other 'hafu' (mixed race) kids like themselves and it is also good for them to have somewhere to use English, it is funny how they automatically use English and there is a sometimes a slip into Japanese but it is good to that they are comfortable using both languages.

If you happen to be in the Saitama area, are raising bilingual children and want to join the group, you can find us over here.