Japan Holidays

We had an awesome holiday in Japan. It certainly did live up to the stereotypes about being extremely clean, well organised and polite. It was also surprisingly baby-friendly.

Some useful nuggets which parents travelling with toddlers might want to take note of:

1) Many parks have diaper changing areas and you can borrow a free stroller in most museums, nursing and rooms for your kid to have a nap can be found in most large department stores
2) Serviced Appartments are half the cost of a hotel, and you can choose a layout which favours an early bedtime schedule because parents can shut the bedroom door and sit in the kitchen to read guide books and enjoy a child-free dinner together
3) We tried a cheap ryokan and found out that co-sleeping does NOT work for us because our kid is so used to associating sleeptime with being alone and playtime with being with parents that when she is on a tatami mat together with her parents, she just can't sleep. Depending on your kid's sleeping pattern you might love or hate this communal sleeping thing

It was really wonderful having a long family vacation together, Sophie has benefited from all that extra time with her parents and learned silly stuff like how to:
1) meditate in a Zen Garden
2) say words like "Cool!" and "Mario! (just like the Nintendo PS2 game) - no prizes for guessing which parent taught her that one
3) also courtesy of her dad, she can say 3 syllable words like "asahi" !! I am trying to get her to forget that one before we go to Singapore, I think she'll freak out my parents if she can name the different Japanese beers before being able to say "elephant"
4) She has learnt that saying "coookie" and signing "please" works wonders, okay so the cookies are organic but I always wonder if I am setting her up for a lifetime of obesity and tooth decay if I start letting her eat cookies at 16 months (my husband thinks I should stop being paranoid and just enjoy both the holiday and our lovely daughter who shares her cookies with random strange dogs)

I think I like my job a lot. There was sufficient cover for my files, and whilst I did check email to ensure that it was still under control, I never had to interupt my vacation to actually do work.

You can see the rest of the photos here on my facebook account.

Although I love using Flickr, the free, unlimited storage space on Facebook draws me like a magnet.