Leo has had several emotional freakouts compounded by him being tired but to be perfectly honest, nearly all of his irrational behavior stems from him being tired.

His most recent freakouts were regarding chairs and a snowman.

We had some friends who came from America leave Japan because the husband got better job prospects back home (he was also at the big R while I was there). They needed to clear their apartment and we helped them organize things to be picked up, and moved some things back to our balcony to give to yet another friend. In the process, they gratefully gifted us a smart TV which isn’t relevant to the story, but worth mentioning because it’s amazing. Anyway, they had swiveling chairs that were a bit nicer than our ratty Nittori ones which we bought before Leo was born. We threw away the old Nittori ones and started using the swivel chairs. This didn’t sit well with Leo.

Leo cried. Leo cried some more. He missed the old chairs. This wasn’t just the old song and dance of “I’m not tired! I demand that mother brush my teeth, and it must be the green toothbrush, otherwise, I will literally die here on the kitchen floor due to sadness” performance. Leo was genuinely distraught over this, and it was probably the first time he had to deal with losing something larger than a balloon or a broken Happy Meal toy.

I consoled him, listened to him, and found out that his reasoning was that he wanted the old chairs. Also, he wanted to sit on them. Whether that means that he had aspirations to use those particular chairs one day remains unclear (I don’t want to broach the subject and trigger more sadness).

Next was the snowman. We received an unusual bout of snow on March 29th, 2020, and Yuki helped Leo to build a snowman.
Well, the prospects that snow melts and that the snowman is a man made out of snow were too much for Leo to deal with and his response was more crying while getting ready to go to sleep. That led to more consoling from me.
He would usually flip his shit when it came to building things with Duplos. If his creation was in any way altered, he would lose his goddam mind and insist that we fix it to be exactly as it were. I do my best to encourage him to make new things, telling him that trying, practicing, and making ends up with something better than last time. He’s sort of ok with busting apart his Duplo creations now (but if Joji dares sully them, he still has a full-blown shitfit and yells at Joji).
OK, back to the snowman; I did my best to help him understand that he made something great but it is temporary. The sakura are the same way – so pretty but only here for a short time, and that makes us appreciate them more.

Joji isn’t good with language and very frequently will resort to lots of screaming. He also will make eye contact with someone and then go hit a wall. It’s bad behavior, but hilariously cute.
The other night he had a full meltdown because Yuki wouldn’t let him touch the soap in the shower. As I usually do, I received Joji at the shower room door and took him to dress him in his PJs, but he was still freaking out super hard. After I got a diaper on him I tried to distract him by putting him under a towel, which I call “cave” and is something that he really really likes. He calmed down and just lay his head on my chest and I started whispering things to him like “It’s ok bud, you don’t need to freak out like that”, and he was whispering back cute gibberish to me after I would speak to him. It was insanely cute. I think he was exhausted that day.