Play in the tub for a really long time.

Click on the photo to see the whole bath time set.

Who has Olympic fever? We do! We do!

I didn’t watch the Olympics when I was a kid. I’m not sure why, I guess I didn’t get it. Stephen and I started watching sometime while we lived in Durham. If it’s summer, I swear it is my favorite. If it is winter, then that is my favorite.

While I agree with some of the things Geof said in his post about the Olympics, I still can’t help myself from getting chill bumps at the opening ceremonies and feeling a kinship with the whole rest of the world.

Some of you may have seen my sporadic and ongoing duel with people who see my comparison of the Guitar Hero controllers with the Kidz Beats guitar and take it very seriously. Since I’m nice that way, I string them along, occasionally abetted by friends.

But now, thanks to Misty, I have incontrovertible proof of how superior the Kidz Beats guitar is: you can turn it into a USB controller for Frets on Fire, the open source Guitar Hero clone. All you need is the guitar, a spare USB keyboard, soldering ability, the willingness to cut circuit board traces, and a Dremel tool to cut holes in the guitar body. Easy!

Have you seen any way to turn a Guitar Hero controller into a toy that plays Old Macdonald automatically at the press of a fret button? No? Case closed.

Baby gates, while useful for safety, are really annoying. If you’re lucky enough to be 5’6″ or so, they’ll come up to your mid-thigh or lower. You can then try to step over it and risk the chance of tripping and smashing your nose on the floor. Or you can remove it, step through, and replace it, which is so annoying that you’ll stop going to the room that the baby gate has cordoned off, eventually forgetting that that room even exists.

Maxwell’s Li’l Demon solves that problem. The demon is actually a field designed to pass those who are 3 years old or older and be impervious to those who are younger. You will walk straight through, while your toddler will pull up on it and wail at being excluded. Future revisions of Maxwell’s Li’l Demon will let you set the age limit.

When we talked about buying presents in Japan for our family, one gift I knew ahead of time: green tea for my dad. He’s a confirmed green tea drinker, and while he has his supply of Chinese green tea from a friend, he hadn’t had Japanese green tea.

Beyond the vague shopping list of “tea, green” and a desire to avoid the Japanese equivalent of Lipton green tea, I had no plan. I was excited when we passed a specialty tea shop while we were spiraling in to our ryokan, but since we were — not lost, exactly, but not entirely found, we decided to return later.

We weren’t able to stop until the last afternoon in Kyoto, on our way to check out of the ryokan. The store looked closed, but one of the two women chatting outside was the owner, and ushered us back in.

Our Japanese-speaking friend once again had the pleasure of translating for me as we tried to figure out what kind of tea she sold, and what the difference between the foil bags of tea and the more traditional-looking packages of tea were. It turned out she sold tea powder that you mixed straight into water and drank, and tea leaves mixed with rice that you steeped using an infuser. She could tell we were confused by the difference, so, unprompted by us, she grabbed a package of both kinds from the shelves, ripped them open, and made us tea.

While she made tea and fetched cups, I boggled that she was so willing to do that for us. The second surprise came when, as she was serving the tea-and-rice combination, she said, “I’m learning English, but I don’t know it very well yet.” She had a nearly American-neutral accent.

We ended up buying both kinds of tea for my dad and some for us as well. The owner wrapped everything up in many layers of paper. As I turned to leave, she dropped several packages of green tea cookies in the bag.

So I got my present for my dad. Even better, I got a story to go with the present.

Liza is a girly girl. She loves shoes and she loves to play dress up. In fact, she’ll play dress up when there’s only Dad’s shorts to dress up in. Needless to say, we have to be pretty careful about leaving dirty clothes on the bathroom floor now. Click on this picture and then see them all as a slide show. She goes through the whole process of getting them off and then back on again. It makes me giggle.

Until this Sunday, church involved us leaving our kids with other people while we went off and were all godly. That’s changed now: Eli is old enough to sit in church with us.

More importantly, Eli is now old enough for Children’s Church.

A quick primer on Children’s Church. In our particular flavor of mainline Protestant Christianity, there’s a tradition of having the preschool children come to the front of the sanctuary to take part in a very short lesson before they’re bundled out of the sanctuary for their own time of instruction. In part this is because they are too young and full of energy to have learned to sleep through the sermon. It’s also because kids will say anything that pops into their heads, and in doing so provide the opportunity to laugh at the parents.

You know, I always enjoyed that last part until yesterday.

Eli did wonderfully through the first part of the service. He loves music, and the flute and oboe duet that served as the prelude held him rapt. I sat on the pew and held the hymnal while we sang hymns. He even stayed silent through the first congregational prayer.

Then it came time for Children’s Church.

I realized what I was in for when Eli marched up to the steps up to the sanctuary stage and, rather than sitting in front of the ministry intern who was teaching the lesson, sat down right beside her. That, of course, meant her lapel mic picked up everything he said.

“Today we’re going to talk about treasure,” the teacher began.

“Oh, I already know what that is,” Eli said, his tiny voice amplified into something much louder.

He kept up a running commentary throughout, only stopping after the lesson had ended and the teacher had prayed. “That praying time was much shorter than the first one,” he said as he hopped down and came back to sit by me.

We sang another hymn before he left the sanctuary for the full kids’ lesson. And as he marched back down the aisle and out of the sanctuary, I could see time marching in lock-step beside him, marking his passage into a new stage of childhood. He walked past a row of camp chairs that our church gives to new 7th graders when they join the youth group, and past the pile of rolled-up camp chairs that go with the graduating seniors who are headed off to college, and all I could think was, there is his future. It’ll be here tomorrow.

On Thursday we drove the kids to West Memphis, AR to meet the grandparents. After lunch, we hopped back in the car and drove to Nashville, TN and spent the night with my college roommate, Terry, and her family. We had dinner with them and got our trip off to a great start by hanging with friends we haven’t gotten to spend a lot of time with lately. Friday, Terry drove us to the Nashville airport so we could fly to New York.

Friday evening, after a fantastic dinner with Fahmida’s family, we had the brilliant idea to stay up late so that we’d sleep on the plane on Saturday. Yeah, ok, that idea was less than brilliant, but we didn’t have our children and we really wanted to go see a movie.

We got on Japan Airlines at 11ish am on Saturday. Thirteen hours later we were in Tokyo.

We landed about an hour earlier than we were scheduled. We started by going to the Japan Railways office to redeem our JR pass. That pass was the best investment of the whole trip, btw. It allowed us to ride all over Japan on the JR line as much as we wanted to for seven days. We got on a subway-like car to take us to the station where we could catch the bullet train to Osaka.

I was thinking to myself, “10 minutes on the tram thingie and then we’re on the Shinkansen.” Nope, it was more like 45. Yeah, 45 minutes of riding through Tokyo. It’s that big. Once we got on the bullet train, I wanted desperately to watch the scenery but I could hardly stay awake. I dozed and tried to keep one eye open for my only look at the country side. I missed my only chance to see Mt. Fuji on that train ride.

About two and a half hours later we were in Osaka. Then we got on the subway for 30 minutes, carted our luggage up and down about 900 stairs and then spilled out onto the street in Osaka. We were so tired we were barely standing upright.

These are some of the first sights we saw:

We found our Ryokan and gratefully fell onto our futons and passed out.

The next morning we woke up to this:

and this:

The first day, we wandered the streets and got an idea of what city life is like in Osaka. Theater is big:

and so are castles:

The whole day felt magical. I guess that’s what you get your first day in a foreign country. I spent the better part of the day refraining from the we’re-in-Japan happy dance. I’m sure the folks in Osaka appreciated my restraint.

Click on any of the pictures to see all of the photos from Osaka.

We ended the day by bullet training to Kobe to have dinner.

It was pretty Westernized but the cachet of being able to say we took the Shinkansen to Kobe to have Kobe beef was too awesome to pass up.

I found this cool craft on one of my craft blogs and I wanted to do it but I didn’t have a tin.

A few days later, I was digging around in my car for some hand lotion and I found an old round Altoid’s Tin. It was almost as good as Christmas.

I immediately set out to refashion a tin. Eli helped me pick the paper for it and we had to make a special trip to Hobby Lobby to get Modge Podge. I know, I can’t believe I didn’t have any either.

Here are the results:

Liza says, “Buh-fly!”

I made it without the Aleene’s Paper Glaze because I couldn’t find any at the stores here in town. I wish I’d had it because I think it would have gotten rid of the tacky feeling of the modge podge.

Anyway, it’s been sitting on my desk a couple of days and I’ve been enjoying it but I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. Today I got a note from a friend who has recently moved to Colorado. I decided to send it to her. I have loaded it up with some fun goodies and I’ll put it in the mail next week. Here’s what all fit in the tin:

Today starts my month without caffeine. If I’m randomly cranky over the next several days, that’s why.