Friends, family, and first-time visitors. After blogging about my wife’s pregnancy for much of the last year, our son, Rikuto, was finally born at 9:25am on Sunday, July 22nd 2007, at the prefectural hospital, Gifuken Sougou Iryou Center.
I rushed Mami to the maternity clinic at 5:30 in the morning, and it wasn’t long before the [...]
July 31st is the due date for our firstborn child, Rikuto, and that date is getting very close now. With less than two weeks to go, I thought I’d take a video of my wife’s tummy, so you can see the baby move around for yourselves! You may have to watch it a couple of [...]
Today was the first day I was able to join Mami at the maternity clinic. Usually when she goes, I’m at work, and it has been very difficult to find a time that suits us both. So, with just over four weeks to go until the baby is due, I was quite excited about our [...]
Continue reading about Baby in Progress - Rikuto at 35 weeks
I’m writing this post using Windows Speech Recognition so I don’t have to touch the keyboard to write what I want to say. Isn’t that great? Anyway, today I have a great photo of Rikuto from outside his mother’s tummy.
Mami is now 34 weeks pregnant and looks it! Since she finished working at [...]
Continue reading about Baby in Progress - Rikuto at 34 weeks
When does human life begin? Is it at conception or when a baby is born? If you believe life starts when a baby is conceived then that makes me a father already, so happy Father’s Day to me!
In fact, Mami got me my first ever Father’s Day present which you can see me modeling in [...]
It’s been a while since my wife and I got a decent picture of our baby boy from the maternity clinic, but now we finally have one that doesn’t look like a cloudy bowl of miso soup.
In my post “Making the Baby Bed“, I talked about how pregnancy in Japan lasts 10 months, so although [...]
This evening, we ordered a pizza to celebrate my wife’s last day of work. I’m not so sure she should be eating pizza, but I guess she’s got two mouths to feed.
Mami only worked at the hospital for a year, but it felt like much longer. Rarely a day went by wihtout her coming home [...]
Japanese Golden Week is one of my favorite times of the year. It’s not too hot, nor too cold, and best of all, I have a week off.
I seem to be the only person who finds the name “Golden Week” a little inappropriate. Sure enough, there are so many national holidays squeezed into these seven [...]
I was talking to my mum on the phone about pregnancy in Japan lasting 10 months as opposed to nine. Neither of us had a clue as to how it could be different, but we laughed ourselves silly at the idea of an extra month for Japanese women. Thankfully, a quick Google search gave us [...]
It’s been a month since Mami last went to the maternity clinic, but she went back today for another check-up, and everything is fine. I wish I could have gone with her, but I can’t deny my students their weekly English class! Nevertheless, I got to see the latest video of Rikuto, the baby formerly [...]
Since I found out that I’m gonna be daddy, I’ve been posting pictures of the progress Peanut has been making. Today, Mami and I found out that Peanut is a boy! Neither of us minded either way, but I’m quite excited about the prospect of teaching him to ride a bike and play soccer.
We got [...]
With Mami four months pregnant, we have been thinking about which nationality our child should be. It’s really not a hard decision to choose Japanese as Peanut’s nationality since he or she will be born and raised in Japan and take Mami’s family name.
However, I’ve just been reading about birth registration on the British Embassy’s [...]
My first five years in Japan were spent living in downtown Nagoya, among the skyscrapers, train stations and other concrete structures. Most parks were simply gravel areas for kids to run around on. Now, nearly ten years after coming to Japan, I’m living in what the Japanese would call ‘the countryside’. So I thought I’d [...]
Across from where they are building the new shopping center is a four-storey department store for baby stuff. Although I’ve passed it everyday on the way to work for the past two years, I never realized just how great it was! I was kicking myself after spending loads on teaching toys at Toys-R-Us, when I [...]
It’s been four months now since Mami became pregnant and I’ve been posting each time she’s come back from the clinic with a new photo. If you missed the previous posts, here are the photos so far. It’s fascinating to see how ‘Peanut’ has grown. We started at six weeks with nothing visible except for [...]
I’m at the end of my two-week Christmas holidays, and I don’t feel like I’ve had a moment to relax. Moving house started on December 22nd when I got up early, rented a ‘High Ace’ van and spent the whole day hauling boxes and furniture over to our new house. It was 3am by the [...]
Mami is in her third month of labor now, and ‘Peanut’ is making some great progress. You can now clearly see his or her head, hands and feet! It’ll be another month before Mami goes back to the clinic so I can’t wait to see how much Peanut will have grown by then. Stay tuned!
Peanut [...]
December 20th should have been a historic day in our lives. The day we officially purchased and took ownership of our first house. However, what should have been a time of celebration turned out to be one of the worst days of our lives as Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Bank decided to screw us over by declining [...]
Mami has been back to the clinic and had another scan. Peanut (working title!) is currently in his or her seventh week, and is starting to look more and more like….erm… Casper the friendly ghost?
If you missed the last photo, “Peanut at 6 weeks”, here it is:
Peanut at 7 weeks:
So apparently Peanut is the right-hand [...]
A few months ago, I posted about buying a house and getting a mortgage in Japan. There were times when I didn’t think it would be possible without a permanent residency visa, but eventually we managed it… and we move next week!
If you’re thinking of buying a house in Japan, you might want to consider [...]
