4 April 2010

In the morning we attended a hanami picnic held by the nursery, in Kiba Park, a place we hadn't been to before over on the east side of town. Unfortunately it was really chilly and the sun didn't manage to break through the grey cloud all day. It's a great park, with a good playground, a large splash pool for the summer and a big open space with a mass of cherry blossom, beneath which many of the ubiquitous blue and green mats had been set out.

As we looked back through the bridge in the centre of the park we could see the half-finished Sky Tree,a communications tower that will eventually be about 600 metres high and the tallest structure of its kind. This week it became taller than Tokyo Tower so was on the news a lot.

Isy was also there, which was good as Emily was quite shy and clingy at first. Oli had made some tasty hot cross buns, which reminded me that it was Easter. I had completely forgotten because much as they like chicks and bunnies here, there is little mention of it in Japan. The kids enjoyed a simplified egg hunt: two small plastic eggs with their names on and tooth-rotting goodies inside for them to 'find' in the grass. I blew bubbles for the two girls to chase and our two families did a few rounds of Ring-a-Roses together, and then it was all over. Given the cold I was happy enough to pack up and get into the warmth of the station.

It was a tight schedule, actually, as we then had to go off to meet Nick's friend Mark and his husband Rene, who were holidaying from the UK, and their friend Vince. The latter lives with his partner on the British embassy compound and works at Goldman Sachs (Nick's boss wants to hire him to CS so they had a lot to chat about). None of them knew the Odaiba area, so we took them for the ride across on the boat from Shibaura. It was perishing but Emily and I huddled on deck together so we could look at the many points of interest. We were even rewarded with a sighting of the airship, which has just begun daily flights again after an absence of a few months. Eschewing the horrors of the shopping mall, we strolled along the waterfront park and back to pick up the monorail for home.

I had already decided that we would try to go through without a nap, though Emily was in the stroller for half an hour at one point and showed no sign of dropping off anyway. She was clearly very tired by the time we got home; alternately fizzing with activity then clingy and tetchy. We managed to get her through to bedtime by use of a whole hour-long Peppa Pig DVD. She was very pleased with the chocolate bunnies from Grandma and also a cute duck backpack.

Worryingly, she still showed little sign of doing a poo, though she mentioned it a few times, so that is five full days without one. I would gladly go back to the three day cycle I once fretted about now. We decided that it is time we consulted a doctor this week.