First Kitchen

First Kitchen, known as City Convenience Restaurant, is fast food chain serving variety of foods including burgers, soup, and pasta.  It’s not a place I go often, but D and I had lunch inside food court in a shopping mall.  The price for burgers is bit more expensive than McDonald’s and other chains, but we both liked the food.

D ordered teriyaki burger meal, and I ordered kid’s chicken nuggets meal.  Teriyaki burger meal came with fries and drink, like other chains, but you could chose the flavour of the fries – called “flavour potato”.  It’s like shaker fries of McDonald’s.  The flavours are unique: corn potage, flame-grilled mentaiko (marinated roe of pollock), soy BBQ, sizzling butter and soy sauce, butter, consomme, and French fries.  D chose soy BBQ.  It was good 🙂

There is sauce bar at the counter where you can get any sauces as much as you want.  The sauces are BBQ sauce, mentaiko mayonnaise, cheese sauce, and garlic mayonnaise.

I love Japanese fast food because their drink menu has more varieties.  I always chose tea (usually oolong tea).  You can also get hot/iced lemon/milk tea and cocoa with meals with no additional cost.

It may be just because it was weekday and there’re not so many people around, but they made all the food on order including fries and nugget.  Crispy and super hot.  With kid’s meal I got to chose a toy from a basket, and I got Stitches stationery kit.

We were thinking of getting some sweets there as well, but didn’t.  Their tapioca coconut milk float and shiratama cream zenzai (chewy dango with stewed sweet azuki bean and soft serve) looked yummy!

Change of Things – Perth and Japan

It started to be cold and windy since the second day. It’s raining, and the wind outside sounds like it will be snowing anytime soon. The air is cold – but the thing is that inside the shops, restaurants, or trains is quite warm and I don’t know what to wear. I only brought just few clothes because I wasn’t gonna go out much during the stay and also I thought I could always buy nice clothes here if I want to.

We did a bit of shopping yesterday coz we needed something urgently for Hiro. Things here are pretty much different from those in Perth. We had to change some of our rutine. First, we brought our microwave sterilizer to sterilize the bottles and pump, but the microwave in my house is too small to fit the sterilizer! I can’t even put a microwave sterilizing bag. It ‘s very short too. I don’t know why my dad bought such small microwave… I guess they don’t have anything big to warm up? Hmmm… so we can’t use microwave sterilizer, we decided to do the basic method – sterilizing in boiling water. We needed a tray, drying rack, sponge etc to wash Hiro’s bottles so we headed to Daiso nearby and bought several stuff. Men, things at 100 yen shop always remind me how cheap I could get things around the house. 🙂

As I mentioned earlier, I brought my electric pump to express milk here in Japan.  Hiro is almost 9 months old, and I think I did a good job feeding him EBM (expressed breast milk) since he was born (considering the trouble of extra cleaning and time consuming).  And I’m still thinking to continue this until my milk dries out.  But, on the day I arrived my home in Shiga, I found that the electric pump is weird.  It kept stopping while pumping. I thought it’s broken due to the air pressure on the plane or something, but it turned out that the batteries needed to be replaced.  I guess it uses lots of power.  I was using this pump connected to power while in Perth, so I didn’t know how quickly I had to replace the batteries.  When I thought the pump was broken, I was actually thinking of stoping giving breast milk to Hiro.  Somewhere in my head I want to stop because it’s troublesome to express milk.  But I also think that I want to breastfeed him as long as I have milk.  So, the broken pump could be the opportunity for me to stop, but I guess I will keep continue doing what I do now until the time comes.

By the way, Hiro loves crawling on tatami!  The house is cold, and he escapes from blanket while sleeping, so he wears pretty warm (not too warm though) clothes on this futon.  Lucky I bought this baby circle crib thing from Amazon… otherwise he would be somewhere else (not on his futon) in the morning.  All the rooms are connected in my house (just separated with paper sliding doors (sho-ji), so he could be anywhere.  He seems to enjoy sleeping on futon, and has been pretty happy since we arrived here 🙂

a

First Flight with 8 Month Old Baby

It’s 2AM, and dark and raining outside.  I should be tired and sleepy, but I’m writing this with a bottle of warm milk next to me in case Hiro wakes up for his feed anytime soon.  Everyone in this house is sleeping, except me and my bro.  I hear tv sound from his room.  It’s Saturday night (Sunday morning?) and I guess it’s the only time he can enjoy staying late during a week.

I arrived Kansai airport yesterday afternoon.  I must say I’m very happy and relieved that we are here finally.  Japan is not as cold as I thought – it’s raining, and it gets dark around 6:00 PM, but the temperature is not cold and I was kinda sweating when I arrived airport.  I’m not even wearing a jacket or pair of socks right now. (even at 2AM!)

The flight …..   was AWEFUL.  It wasn’t the worst because Hiro did sleep pretty well on the plane, but D and I (and maybe Hiro too) were exhausted.  We left Perth home around 9PM – Hiro was sleeping in his cot, but woke up in the car and stayed awake in the airport.  He seemed to be calm and quiet, and we thought he’d fell asleep with warm milk as soon as we get on the plane.  But, it didn’t happen.  He was obviously tired and sleepy, but couldn’t go to sleep and that made him very uncomfortable and irritated.  He wasn’t crying though – just wiggly and rubbing his eyes many many times.  I was trying to pad him to sleep, but you know the airplane seat is very narrow and I couldn’t really move around like I do at home.  I was moving him up to down, left to right….. and then, he started to gag and threw up everything he ate since 5PM, including pumpkin and all the milk.

It was a LOT of vomit.  He kept throwing up every 2 seconds for about 10 seconds, and I thought he was choking.  All the food came out through his mouth and nose, and my seat and clothes were completely soaked with his vomit.  I could hear everyone around me was saying “OH MY GOD…!”  I was in panic, and tried to settle him down quickly.  When I saw his smile, I was very relieved.

Luckily I brought a change clothes for him so I could change him, but I didn’t have my own.  I had to take my tops off and wear a cardigan on top of a camisole I was wearing.  Smelly….!  After changing his clothes he was still active, but in the end I managed to put him to sleep around 2AM – 2 hours after departure.  The flight was midnight so everyone was sleeping by then.  Then D and I could sleep a bit.  We book a basinet seat in advance – the seat is at the front so there’s lots of leg room, but we couldn’t put any baggage underneath or front of our seat.  We had to put everything in compartment above us.  That was bit troublesome when we wanted to get something from our bags.  This is what basinet looks like (Cathay Pacific) ↓

The another thing which was difficult during the flight was preparing milk for him.  As I don’t do breastfeed (express milk in a bottle) I had to bring formula in case I can’t express on the plane.  As soon as he sees a bottle he wanted to drink and started crying.  He didn’t stop crying so I had to feed him before the plane took off/landed.  He had to suck on something while taking-off/landing for preventing earache and he doesn’t take dummies all the time (only when he is sleepy and tired), so I was bit worried that he might finish the milk before the air pressure changed.  He cried a little, but it was ok on both flight.

From these 2 flights I learnt some lessons and now I know what I should and shouldn’t bring to an airplane when flying with a baby.  I actually had lots of baggages – 4 big bags + a baby carrier –  and some of the things I brought weren’t necessary at all. Everything was in different bags and it was so messy and stressful when I needed something and couldn’t find where it was and in which bag.  So from now on, I will prepare the followings for carry-on luggage.  Especially when using bassinet seat you’ll only get a net on the all to store your things.

• a pouch with 1 diaper, wet wipe, 1 disposable changing mat to put in a net in front of you … when you need to rush to toilet to change his diaper, you can just garb it and go.
• a pouch with a pair of socks, dummies, moisturizer and 1 or 2 toys

I will also prepare 1 bag containing baby bottles with 180ml of sterilized water and measured formula.  I brought few empty baby bottles and an empty thermo bottle, and got hot water from a cafe inside airport to make formula, but it was hard to cool down the boiling water when Hiro wanted milk.  It just took too long.  I found that I could ask flight attendant to warm up the water on the plane, so I thought I should have divided the sterilized water in bottles in advance and ask them to warm up to desired temperature.  It is much easier and stressless.

I brought too many diapers to the airplane.  I just used 3 diapers during 2 flights, but there’re more than 10 diapers in my carry-on luggage!  I brought an electric pump (which can be used with batteries) so I could pump at airport and on the plane, but I just didn’t have time for it.  I did it once on the plane from Perth to Hong Kong, but it was bit messy and I had to worry about washing the pumps.  I brought microwave sterilizing bags, but didn’t use it on the plane and at airport either.

We arrived Kansai airport around 3:30m PM, and reached home around 6PM.  My dad, mum and bro came to airpot to pick us up in a big car (to fit extra parson).  Hiro was awake after 6PM feed, but slept from 9PM until 6AM next morning!  He must have been so tired.   But thanks to that, D and I could get a good sleep 🙂