September

Its been an eventful week. We went down to Ikadaba in the weekend and then we met up with Rachel in Tokyo. I'll post about that later, and use this post to try to get up to date.

The big change over the last 3 weeks is that Hannah has begun to smile.

And pretend to laugh at my jokes. Some of the time

Rika has been teaching her to wave for her public.

Hannah is adorable when she is in a good mood.

Or asleep.

But unless she is being held or fed she often seems uncomfortable. As a calming mechanism the slings are still having 'deferred success' most of the time.

Hannah usually can't fall asleep on her own. So the usual pattern has been for us to hold her until she gets calm and falls asleep.

Then we can put her down. This operation requires extremely careful and patient movements of the sort more normally required for defusing bombs.

The trick is to move slowly enough to avoid setting-off her 'tilt trigger'. Sudden movements will wake her up and start her crying until she is held back to sleep again.

Gently does it.... Success! Free time to do something else...

Since Rika often doesn't have time to cook we sometimes get take outs. Hannah enjoys going out and is usually well-behaved in the baby carrier. This local resturant is a favourite of Rika's Mum (really). The curry is flavoured using special eggs from Himalayan roosters.


One calming technique we have not used much but have tried recently is to swaddle Hannah (aka the Shelob technique).

To begin with Hannah did not like this one bit.

But after 10 min crying, like magic, she became calm.


The cats are OK, although Minimi is showing signs of feeling hurt and underappreciated. When I'm with Hannah he generally keeps his distance because he finds her crying unpleasant, and he seems scared of her hiccups. But usually when I'm working or sleeping on my own he comes over for a cuddle.


Sasuke has a new 'strange single behaviour'. As you know he is named after a famous ninja. Recently he has started practicing ninja invisibility techniques. (They sometimes even work - did you see him in the other photo?)

Sasukes toilet training has suffered a few setbacks. A few weeks ago, right in front of us he walked onto a futon, looked at us and then let go. Futon ruined.

After a couple of weeks of this I was getting pretty grumpy (I know, may be hard to believe) and Rika was getting pretty tired of both of us.

So on the Saturday I looked after Hannah for the afternoon and let Rika get out of the house. That got my halo back up to full-strenth.

Fortunately we managed to catch up on our sleep over the long weekend. So things seen OK at the moment.

Bath Time

Hannah is a little angel at bath time.


I took these photos a couple of weeks ago. As usual, we couldn't decide which are the best ones, so here are the best 0.005% of them


Following Japanese practice, bath starts with a wash outside the bathtub.

She seems to want to grow potatoes in the folds around her neck so we have to wash these carefully.

Then a soak in the tub with Mum

Then a bit of a float in the water.

Thats better isn't it!