Happy Birthday Okaasan!

Okaasan's birthday!

Okaasan is 80 years young. Healthy in body, living with family and sometimes having a hard time with a thing called dementia.
Last night we went to Susukino, the nightlife area of Sapporo and had a big crab set dinner at a posh place. Okaasan loves crab. So we had a private dining room, a friendly Chinese waitress and 4? or 5? courses of crab and sake and beer!
All went well. She enjoyed the food, We enjoyed ourselves and all was positive.
The waitress gave us two little flasks of sake...Yujiro kept them on his  side of the table, and then under the table out of sight so he could ration how much Okaasan drank - she doesn't realize/remember how much she is drinking and it is very easy for her to become tipsy quickly. Sake is strong and served in tiny glasses...but before he secreted them away she did say a few times: "Is that sake? I like sake! I'll have some sake!"..about a minute after her glass was empty.

We came home by taxi and used one of those services where the taxi comes with two drivers, one to drive the customers in the taxi and the other to drive the customers' car.

Anway - a good night. Recently in Japan there have been some horror stories of elderly people/families ....here we are trying to look after this lady and make sure her life is happy.
Today is actually her birthday so I'll get some flowers and package up a lot of the Kawagoe pamphlets as a dinner present for Okaasan.
I wonder if any other family will contact her at all? Birthdays are not a big thing for adults in Japan...but even so...80 is a good age to have reached.

Crab shabu-shabu with the rice and MORE crab added at the end.

YES! She went!

Yup...Okaasan overcome all the silliness (for this week anyway) and went to hula dance class.
Yujiro's letter worked...she ate the bits of lunch on the kitchen table, got washed and dressed and WENT to the class.

Great. She enjoys it. She needs the exercise. She needs the social interaction with classmates.

In fact she then stayed out for hours and ate something downtown. Came home about 6.30 pm.
Ate dinner with Yujiro, and was pretty tired after a big day out.

Yujiro didn't ask her directly about hula and later he called the friendly classmate to check that she had actually gone.
Not only had she gone. But she'd been ther first to arrive and greeted everyone!

So that's alright then. For now.

Dear Okaasan, don't get negative...

Dear Okaasan,


Today your darling boy and that woman-who-can't-cook are out at work.


Today is Hula Dance class. It starts at 1 pm. The teacher invited you to join the Dance Performance last month, but you decided to cancel joining.
Lunch
1.  There is rice and instant mis soup
2. There is main course under the food cover.
3.  Put the rice in the microwave for about 2 minutes




Yujiro.

Ahhh...this guy is trying so hard! Instead of his usual: "Let it be, don't talk about it" he is actually being pro-active and stepping in to avert trouble before it happens.

This was the letter from son to mum on the kitchen table this morning...sort of translated by me.....
And it worked! Maybe.
I just came home and she isn't here.
It's Monday afternoon and she is out...did she go to Hula dance class?

We wait to see.

Rainy Sunday

Rained all day....Hokkaido is entering the Tropics.
We all stayed home in the mornng and did stuff...Yujiro and his Hangover, TV, kittens, housework, translation checking...

I got old newspapers and supermarket boxes out of Okaasan's room with her agreement. This time she didn't claim to be keeping boxes for Something Important and willingly gave them up - even showing me how to kung-fu kick the sealed end of the box open! I let her show me how to Correctly Tie Up a Pile of Old Newspapers (there IS a way you know, I think there are ranks and maybe a National Association of Newspaper Tie Uppers...).

Had a little Oyomesan vs Okaasan moment about who might take Yujiro's wedding suit dress shirt to a dry cleaners - I should have let her offer to do it, instead I said: no! no! it's ok....he can decide where he takes it himself etc...and Okaasan looked a bit surprised that I was letting a guy worry about dry cleaning. It doesn't matter at all of course - and it would have been a good thing to let her feel useful, she was just doing a motherly/woman thing for her son...but I didn't want to get into the whole drycleaning shop/money/ticket/pick-it-up-in-a-week scenario....and anyway, Yujiro is more than capable of doing his own dry cleaning.

In the afternoon I escaped with a friend to a tea shop and an exhibition of the Treasures of Pompei at the museum downtown, and came home with a box of sushi for Okaasan's dinner.
Then Yujiro and I walked - WALKED!!!!!- down to the subway station together and had a quiet dinner date in a local chicken-on-sticks restaurant.
Really my walking is getting better and better....I feel I can live again.