Our little boy’s first hoikuen homework
Our little boy is slowly stepping into a new world through hoikuen. 🌿Read here, here, here and here
Every day, I can see him getting a little more comfortable there. He knows the place now, the teachers, the routine… and as parents, Papa and I are really happy to see that. But still, after six or seven months, I have to admit something.
I still feel heavy when I leave him at hoikuen.
Maybe that is just motherhood.
Time passes so quickly, and sometimes I look at him and think, How did we get here already? I never imagined raising my baby in Japan, without our parents or relatives nearby. I imagined family dropping by, someone helping, someone being there just because they are family, never wanted to ask them to do but I know my parents always wanted to do so.
But life had a different plan for us.
Maybe it was God, maybe fate, maybe simply the way life unfolds.
And somehow, here we are — two parents raising a little boy in a country that was once completely unfamiliar to us. We are learning as we go. And the funny thing is, while I was thinking about all of this, Papa and our little boy were sitting in front of me doing his very first hoikuen homework.
It was such a small thing.
Just a piece of blue paper.
But somehow, it didn’t feel small to me.
It felt like one of those little moments that quietly tells you, your baby is growing up. Papa is much better at drawing and arts than I am, so I happily let the two of them handle it. 😂
Our little guy is still only 18 months old, though, so of course things didn’t exactly go according to plan. Hoikuen had given him the blue paper to draw something on, and Papa decided they were going to make a sea. Papa had a plan.
Our little boy… had absolutely no plan. 😂
He wanted to touch the paper, move the crayons around, look at everything, get distracted, and generally do anything except sit down and draw a sea. So Papa gently held his little hand and tried to guide him. And I just sat there watching them.
It was a little messy, funny and very very ordinary but I loved the moment. Because I know these moments won’t stay like this forever. One day, he will sit down and do his homework by himself. and he will come home from hoikuen and tell us about his friends. And maybe I will look back at this tiny piece of blue paper and remember an 18-month-old boy who didn’t really understand what “homework” was yet, and a Papa who patiently tried to help him draw a sea.
So yes, it was just his first hoikuen homework.
Nothing extraordinary happened. But maybe motherhood is mostly made of these very ordinary things. A blue piece of paper. little hand. tired Papa and a curious toddler. And a mother sitting nearby, quietly realising how quickly her baby is growing. I think these are the moments I want to keep
Our little boy, his first hoikuen homework, and their little sea on a blue piece of paper. Just another small memory from our life in Japan.
