Japanese summers are shit. It’s a sad reality that this country – which touts having 4 distinct seasons – has 2 good season, one below average season, and one absolute shit season.
Imagine some place like Hawaii, which arguably has one season. However, that’s a GOOD season. People from around the world visit to experience that season to avoid their own shitty seasons! They don’t need to advertise the variety.
What if Baskin Robbins went and expanding their list of flavors from 31 to 100, but 25% of them tasted like a homeless man’s butthole? Is that a selling point?

Allow me to answer that hyperbolic hypothetical. Fuck no. Absolutely not.

So here I am, sitting in a sweatbox of my own making. My computer is running at about 70C in a room that I feel bad air conditioning, so I simply open the window and turn on a fan, yet I am still soaked in whiskey-smelling sweat and feeling a bit miserable.

But looking at Leo recently cheers me right up because he’s reached a point where he’s not a human-shaped vegetable, but an actual human. He’s communicating. He’s using words or hand signals to express himself. Yuki and I pool our knowledge of what he means. It’s quite amazing, and I am loving bringing out “Leo’s Word Book” which we got from one of Yuki’s friends, which is about 100 words (all pretty good, not 25% shit) and have him point out words that he knows or say words that he can say.

He goes through the book pointing out balls, flowers, cars, trains, and whatever else he is interested in.

It also seems that his greatest interests lie in words that he is able to say. I mentioned in previous posts that he loved hats. It has changed to flowers, and now is cars and trains (but he says the easier Japanese children-versions of the words: boo-boo and den-den). We try to encourage his interests by getting examples of the words that he can say, whether it be my collection of hats (and a ridiculously oversized and hilarious cowboy hat sent from Rachel!), pictures of flowers, balls, or soon to be a collection of train toys.

Tomorrow I am going to take him to a large electronics store with a selection of toys to see if he’ll pick out a car or train toy that he likes. He’s been rather impressive with his ability to identify real cars, toy cars, pictures of cars, and pictures of cartoon cars. So we’re going to get him a new toy which isn’t a piece of trash. (Once again, that’s a bit of hyperbole, because he has actual toys, but his love of those toys is exactly equal to his love of kitchen utensils or empty bottles/containers.

Speaking of which, he’s now getting pretty interested in “open”ing items, or putting objects “in” or “out”, and says it quite a bit. I suppose that “open”, in his silly little pronunciation of “ahp-pun” is the most popular option, because he likes smelling contents of objects, looking inside, or opening doors to go inside of rooms.

Yuki and I had an idea that he was only interested in things that he was able to say, but recently he’s tried to say a few other words that he still has trouble pronouncing. The primary example of those words is shower (How-wa). Even though there are some words that we’ve said to him for numerous months, like “down” or “flower”, he just doesn’t say them, and it is probably because he can’t or because he has alternative options like “uh-oh” (for dropping objects…therefore “down”) or “hana” (Japanese for “flower(s)”).

Pretty much every week brings new interests to him and new vocabulary. He’s walking around all the time now, and has completely forgone crawling unless he is trying to navigate the underside of our kitchen table.

Even though he blasts around the house barefoot, he can’t move too well in shoes, and usually says “up. up. up!” to make us pick him up. Lazy little dude.

We’re avoiding saying “no”, or the Japanese “I don’t like/want this (thing)” “iyada”. Instead, we’ve been saying “careful!” for things that can hurt him, or “hot!” for hot things. I had to yell “careful! uh-oh!” at him today which brought him to tears, and it was a false flag operation because he opened the freezer and I don’t want him doing that. If he knows how to open the fridge, areas under the sink (which the little dude has ripped all the child-safety stuff off of ffs), turning off power strips, or flushing the toilet, he’ll continue doing those with impunity.

While writing this, I realized that he has a pretty big attention focus on nouns and adjectives, but not on verbs. The only verbs that he knows how to say are the cutesy Japanese “nen-nen” for “nenko”, or sleep, as well as “om-nom-nom”, which we’ve taught him for eating because it’s funny.

OK, this is the closing sentence.