A Day in the Life

Today I’m going to describe a typical day for the Sushi on a Stick household. This could be really boring, but here goes anyway.

6:00
Alarm goes off. This is possibly the earliest I’ve ever had to set the alarm in my life. I don’t like early mornings, especially when it’s about 3 degrees in the bedroom.
6:10
Get up and start making breakfast.
6:20
Wake kids up. Needless to say they love the early mornings too.
6:30
Eat breakfast with the kids. Since they don’t get anything more to eat until 12:40 (no playlunch at Japanese school), the idea is to stuff them full of food so they can last the distance. Usually I go for the Japanese-style breakfast of rice and miso soup and some salad, which sounds a bit weird first thing in the morning but is actually wonderfully hot and filling and easier to wolf down than milk-drenched cereal and toast. Having said that, we usually have a bit of toast too just to spice up the cultural mix.
Occasionally Eleni will surface at this hour and mumble a few incoherent instructions at the kids, only to collapse into bed exhausted as soon as they’re out the door and go back to sleep for another hour or two. (The other day she actually got up at 6:10 and did the breakfast herself! This monumental effort so depleted her energy resources that she had to go straight back to bed afterwards and didn’t emerge until midday.)
7:05
Push the kids out the door to meet with their official walking group partners. The walking groups are highly organised as you would expect and if each bunch of kids along the way doesn’t turn up at their allotted time and place the whole group will fall behind, and since we’re the first we have the extra added sense of responsibility, so the bottom line is the kids HAVE to be out the door at 7:05 or else we will bring shame on the proud family name of KYAPPU.
7:10
Start work. The upside of the ridiculously early mornings is that I effectively have about 10 hours at my disposal until the kids arrive home in the afternoon. The theory is that I should be able to get all my work done and then laze around at night watching the telly, although this hasn’t quite happened as I’ve been busy during the day with various official procedures (and going out for the occasional sneaky doughnut).

Daytime
The rest of the day is spent at my desk, gazing out at the ships and tugboats plying back and forth in between the islands. (NB: for medical purposes of course; apparently you have to refocus your eyes regularly away from the computer to avoid eye strain. Perhaps not quite so regularly, but I’m trying to take good care of my eyes.)
Eleni surfaces at some stage and potters around downstairs. She plans to get a job sometime but is more interested in being a lady of leisure at the moment; she whiles away the hours by hanging out the washing, tidying up the house, studying recipe books and checking her emails.
At some stage during the day Eleni and I usually go for a walk. We’ve worked out a nice little 40-minute loop that goes over the mountains (the same road that the kids take twice a day) to the Lawson convenience store where we can buy lunch, then back along the beach. Highly convivial.

Afternoon
The kids arrive home at around four or five o’clock, depending on what time school finishes (it seems to be different every day), how slowly the other kids amble along, whether they stay behind at school to play with friends etc etc.
On the early (4 pm) days, a friend or two might come over for a play, or Felix (not Ruby as yet) might get invited to someone’s house. This usually finishes up at about 5:30.
Then there’s homework to do. Personally I think that eight hours of schooling is quite sufficient for a primary school student, but they give them about another half hour of homework on top of that. So we try to get the study out of the way as soon as possible.
Wednesday is soccer practice night; other than that we’re at home in the evenings. Ruby and Felix need lots of sleep — though of course they’d never admit as much — which means bed by eight or eight-thirty, so we really only have a three or four hour window before bedtime to fit in playing, homework, dinner, saxophone/trumpet practice and, if we’re really lucky, a card game or a Skype chat.
There never seems to be enough time and we need to be super-organised. Ruby complains that there’s no time to update her blog/rearrange her photos/make new music playlists/catch up on Facebook/msn all her friends with amusing icons/Skype everybody in the known world with a computer. I can understand her frustration; but I guess it’s better to be busy than bored.

Evening
After the kids are bundled off to bed, I usually do a couple more hours upstairs in the office. I have to go to bed earlier these days on account of the six o’clock starts, but after a nice bath that’s all you generally feel like doing anyway.

So that’s our day. Did it make for interesting reading? If not, here are some consolation photos:

Dinner is so much fun at Sushi on a Stick HQ.

And after dinner, what could be nicer than a Family Card Game. Note the emo wannabe teenager.

Click here for more happy family snaps.