Tokyo 7 Aug

Here we are in Tokyo. Right now I’m sitting in ichiran waiting for my nice bowl of ramen while Johnny walks the little boy around. The flight was ok except I seem to have lost the ability to sleep on the aircraft. My body aches all over from trying to find a decent position to sleep in. Flights are naturally anti-infants — small cramped space, no seat for infants except the tiny little bassinet where they can’t even flip without getting stuck, and worst of all, the frequent turbulence announcements that means you have to remove the sleeping child out of the bassinet.in the end, he ended up sleeping in Johnny’s lap most of the way.

One particular stewardess also seemed fairly new and zealous about keeping strictly with the rules of having absolutely no bags under my chair so I had to make do without all the stuff in our hand carry. I.e toys, jacket, inflatable neck pillow etc. It wasn’t a particularly great flight for us because we were so pooped out but at least Calvin managed to sleep almost the whole way through, minus the initial part before takeoff when he was all grumpy and crying.

And now I’ve woken up from a long afternoon nap in the hotel room. It’s 6 pm now and both the two boys are still asleep. I wonder if I should wake them up soon. Silly me forgot to pack in Johnny’s spare change of berms. And to think our hand carry luggage is so unmanageable as it is with all the omissions I’ve made. I blame it all on calvin’s stuff — just the diapers, milk powder and drinking water is a pretty hefty bag in itself. Add in almost a dozen of his favorite books and some toys and viola, we have almost two bags fills of his stuff. The rest is filled up with our own personal documents which can’t be put in the checked baggage. Speaking of which, we didn’t manage to check them through to LAX and had to put them in storage lockers at the airport. Rats, and I was hoping I wouldn’t have to burn our limited yen budget on that.

We saved a little by taking the keisei limited express instead of the skyliner. The new skyliner takes about half an hour whereas the limited express which is only 1000 yen per pax took about 1.5 hours. Calvin seemed to have enjoyed himself being on the ‘choo choo’ though. So far, apart from the lack of sleep, we are enjoying our first real holiday since Calvin came into our lives. Ichiran and the hand rolls are great as usual. I can’t it for more great food to come. We’ll have to try and survive the next sector to LAX though.

It is now midnight. Calvin enjoyed himself immensely. I still can’t believe he sang to one of the Japanese commercial jingles. He was also a lot better when I took the iPad away from him when it’s time to sleep. Recently, he’s been wanting to be read to a lot. Looks like he has gotten to the phase where he wants to reread the same thing over and over again. ‘Gain, Gain’ says Calvin. I wonder where he learnt that from. He picks up so many things so quickly now. He’s a real little monkey. We’re thinking of bringing him to the ueno zoo tomorrow since we didn’t manage to go to the Singapore zoo with him.

P.s The zoo plan fell through in the end coz the zoo is closed on Monday. There was a dinosaur exhibit at the park but the lines were terrible, so we ended up going to the airport earlier though the check-in still took a long while as we were trying to through check for the United domestic flight.