[2049] Things change

Things change.

Children grow up. Very quickly in fact.

We have celebrated the baby's first birthday. The elder child will turn 7 in a few months.

I am still waking up every 2-3 hours at night somehow for feedings. (Don't ask me why the baby is still not sleeping through the night. I wished I knew. The first kid slept through the night properly.) So with primary school for the elder kid, I am forced to wake up early daily even though I barely slept every night. Fitbit has me at 4-5 hours of interrupted sleep every night. I am exhausted to be honest. And, it's not like I can ask someone else to walk the kid to school (because there is no one else, the husband has already left for work).

Now that the elder kid has started school, do I have more freedom? If I manage to stay awake after coming home, I will have lots of time to do stuff, except I still have the baby with me, which is not that much freedom. I try to eat, prepare meals, do some housework, get some (usually bare minimal) work done, feed the baby her lunch and then school's over. After that, it's homework time, and I have to supervise the elder kid on her piano practice plus the day's homework plus homework from her school in SG.

I feel like I'm being spread very thin with so many responsibilities. But I can't really push them to anyone else either. I guess it's a matter of choice, I can choose to be alot more relaxed, if I choose not to go back to SG regularly for bb's schooling. However, the consequence being she will most likely lose her English/Chinese skills, and should we ever want to go back to SG, she will never be able to catch up. Do we want the best for our kids? I do. Since she has the chance for a trilingual education, why not, especially if the plan is financially viable? I want her to have the chance to meet more people, do more things, be able to think for herself as much as possible.

I must admit I feel super lonely. Sometimes. Most of the time I have no time to even consider it, given whatever extra time I have, I'm usually trying to read a book to escape. But I see friends and family on social media and I feel homesick. I miss my friends, and maybe just time away from kids. I think this gets worse the longer I have lived in Japan. I disagree with so many ways to do things, I am tired of rude people who shove (yes Japanese people), I just saw an old lady pluck flowers (stealing basically) from the flower box outside a restaurant this morning while I stare at her in shock. She took all the stalks, around 6 in all, and just openly walked off with them. I'm tired of the general hypocrisy of the society here, all the wayang ceremonies and unspoken rules and all the passive aggressive ways of the people. No matter what, the kids are Japanese racially, all the more important bb gets to experience life in both countries for comparison and decide for themselves where they want to live.

Song of the moment -