proud Mom

This is the post of a proud Mom. Feel free to skip it, if you are not in the mood for sappy readings.

Every day we wake up at 6.40, we have breakfast at dawn, with a spectacular view on Sendai, we walk 30 min to the yellow school bus, which leaves at 8.05. Last time I brought her she showed me a short-cut that she discovered with Jeroen. I then go to my office at the university. We meet her again at 16.00, when one of us goes to pick her up from the school bus stop. On the way back, the first few days she texted us "it has been wonderful" or such phrases -to our sheer delight.

She loves her International School and her teacher. She has many friends in her class who help her out, for instance, order lunch and explain to her how things work. She buys Japanese food at the canteen for lunch, which she loves (noodles, curry...). She has one special friend - we already met her parents, went to an indoor playground on a Sunday, had them at our place for a playdate and for dinner.

Her love for her Dutch best friend is enormous and she was beaming when she received a paper letter from her.

She is starting doing her homework everyday: reading, keeping a reading journal, maths. The school already organized a visit to a broadcasting studio, all children have written a blogpost about the visit, they have been busy preparing a play on Greek mythology. At home, she read out to us the script of Pandora's box and the Trojan horse. At school she has Japanese lessons and recorder lessons. One of the things she loves most is playing dodge-ball!


She adores the snow.

We are having a lot of it. Since the winter is sunny here, when we wake up with snow, walking to school is very special.


Last weekend we visited a shinto shrine close to our home: Aoba jinja. It is such a special, silent place, ant it was so fantastic covered in snow that Isabella told me she really felt something there, the feeling that such a place could only be in Japan.

Last Sunday, at Yamadera we had the thickest and most fairy-taley snow ever. Isabella climbed all the 1000 really slippery steps on rain boots.

She is so brave. My 'meet-the-new-visiting-professor-lecture' happened to be planned on the only day Jeroen could not pick her up. It would have been quite stressful for me to go and pick her up at school on the hill and then come to campus just in time to give the talk. Isabella understood that and agreed on being put on a taxi by the head of her school, with a taxi driver who did not speak a word of English, headed for a building she did not know. She made it to campus 13 minutes before my lecture, she enjoyed the snack I had bought her and thanked me for buying all her favourites (onigiri, chocolate bread and chocolate cookies, bottled water).
She read her comic book during my lecture, which lasted the whole 1 and half hour planned, since my new colleagues, to my delight, could not stop asking me questions) and at the end played drawing smileys on the blackboard with the professor of Greek philosophy.

I guess Japan has a wonderful effect on her —but she has always been a pretty special kid <3