Babies

My friend at the Japanese sweet shop just had a new grandchild. This morning we were talking about the differences in customs for new mothers these days. Though it has been 30 years since my first baby, I thought I'd reminisce today (before it gets too far in the past that I forget!)

With our first baby, I still didn't speak much Japanese and I remember visiting the doctor and having things explained to me and not really understanding much at all. And doctor offices then (and now!) often have an inner waiting room with other patients waiting just on the other side of the curtains. I distinctly remember thinking

"Everyone in this room is understanding this doctor's conversation with me, but ME!"

With one baby I remember the doctor consulting his calendar and announcing that I would be wrapped up in a long piece of gauze (in those days they didn't use girdles) on Dog's Day because dogs give birth easily. It didn't seem to be a very medically sound reason for choosing this day (and let me tell you, that gauze wrap was uncomfortable!) but that was what the custom was.

With our first baby we wanted Tetsu be present at birth but we were the very first couple to make such a request and the doctor thought it a very odd American custom. No such thing as Lamaze classes so Tetsu, me and the hospital rolled with the punches. Young, first baby, not much Japanese language. I REALLY needed Tetsu there. With our other two children at different hospitals, for some reason they wouldn't let Tetsu attend the births.

"That's okay. I saw it once."

"Let me tell you, fella! It ain't for your observation!"

I managed the others alone.

In those days, though Western hospitals were letting mothers go home the day after having a baby, in Japan mothers were still being kept a week. I remember people being so surprised when Princess Diana was televised leaving a hospital with Prince William the day after he was born. My sweet shop friend's daughter-in-law came home after 5 days so things are changing in Japan too.

"They kick you out of the hospital these days because there are not enough beds to go around. Poor girl..."

And new Japanese mothers will go home to their own parents' house for a month to let their mother take care of them and the new baby. I've always thought it a shame that the father gets very little bonding time with his new baby that first month. Sometimes he will only visit the hospital after the baby is born and then a month later go to pick up his wife and baby.

At the very least, the new mother's mother will come to stay for a month to do all the laundry and cook and wash dishes etc. In the old days, it was supposed to be bad luck and bad for the health for a new mother to touch water. A new mother wasn't even supposed to bathe for a month. YUCK! You can be sure I threw out all those Japanese customs right away. Tetsu mother came and helped for a week or so but we had our own tiffs about how this new baby was going to be cared for (does the baby sleep face down or face up?) and Tetsu's mother gave up quickly, went home and let me make my own American mistakes...

I think I'll go upstairs and think about making a baby quilt for my friend's grandchild.

Wednesday and I'm off and away

Wordless Wednesday. I'm off in a few minutes. (Already how many words is that?)

This was an interesting tree that Tetsu and I found on one of our drives. It is called a handkerchief tree and looked like lots of little flags waving in the breeze.

The azaleas are blooming in the parks and in the forest. (That picture I was trying to figure out how to blur the background on photos.)

Toi and Patora have moved to the cat house for spring. I don't know if they are happier there or not but they have more of a view and they don't tear things up in my sewing room.

Toi loves Patora (sleeping practically on top of her). Too bad he hates Vel and Cleo.

Happy Mother's Day?

We had a quiet Mother's Day around here. I guess so, children all flown (including me... away from my own mother). But I heard from both of my children and I gave my mom a call.

Hmm. My mother is 90. For more than 30 years we have called back and forth each week or month and would chat on the phone for over an hour. Think how much money the phone company has made off of us! But gradually those telephone calls became few and far between.

This is one of the ways I evaluate my mother's aging process. Whereas we used to have to pull ourselves away from the phone, there came a time when neither of us seemed to have any news. My excuse was that my children were gone and there is only so much you can tell someone about cats. My mother gradually ran out of things to tell me too. A new jigsaw puzzle. Book titles she was reading. Friends she had visited. But jigsaws became too difficult. Book pages she would read over and over. And at 90... not too many friends left...

It was painful for me to answer the same questions in the same telephone conversation.

"Now, HOW many cats do you have? Six?! That's too many! How did you ever get six cats?"

And those repeated questions would come at shorter and shorter intervals and our telephone conversation shortened to 30 minutes, then 15 and recently when I hang up the phone I realize I've only talked to her 10 minutes or less.

But on Mother's Day I'd better give her a call. She wasn't at "home" when I dialed but I caught her at my brother's house (20 steps away!)

We chatted a few minutes and I answered her same questions. When I asked for family news, my mother kept relaying my inquires to my sister-in-law. Finally she said,

"Why don't you just talk with Marcy. She can tell you all that."

It seems that telephone chatting is getting to be a trial for my mother these days...

Ah well, hang-in there Mom! Tetsu and I will be visiting in July and hopefully we can get in a lot of in-person chatting.

*************************

Tetsu and I did visit HIS mother for Mother's Day. Obaachan is 88 and she lives alone in a little apartment and is not very happy. She had called and said she was feeling too badly to have visitors so please not come, but that is what she says every week and to NOT visit your mother on Mother's Day when you CAN, would be a terrible flaunting of filial duty.

Tetsu bought his mother some sweet potatoes and eggs for Mother's Day. Not exactly the same realm of flowers and handkerchiefs but the thought is the same. (Tetsu's mother specifically said that flowers were too hard for her to care for and she hated all the useless stuff that she had accumulated.) Though she perked up enough to sit and chat with us she DID NOT want her picture taken.


So this is my rendition of 'mother and son' in poor lighting photography.

Machine quilting? Hand quilting?

I've been quilting. Both and hand quilting and machine quilting.

The machine quilting is going more slowly than it should just because I don't really know from section to section what I want to do. It is a continual "thinking process".

"Okay. Finished quilting the crosshatch. Now to do the piecing blocks. Is there a way to do a continuous stitch? No... How about stitch in the ditch. Good enough. I'll come back to it if I have more time and thread. The applique border? Stitch in the ditch. I'll come back to it and do meandering if... same as above."

Machine quilting is an upstairs, closet myself in the sewing room for a few hours type of sewing.

And that left me without any downstairs in front of the TV sewing so I basted the Alabama Beauty and have started hand quilting that. Again stitch in the ditch. Ah! I love the repetition and meditation involved with hand quilting! A whole different activity than when I do machine quilting. Both are good and both have nice but different results.

I guess I've come to the conclusion that I couldn't do without either forms of quilting. Sometimes I want to be quick and involved minute by minute, sometimes I just want to relax and let the quilt take on it's own personality. Right now I am enjoying the fruits of both.

A good sign

I guess my theme for the day is SIGNS. In just my immediate neighborhood I realized there was a variety of signs that I go past daily without thinking about them very much... Here is a sampling.


This sign in on the sidewalk on the way to the Jr. high school. The elementary school children are walking one way, the Jr. high kids are riding their bikes the other direction and when they meet... Who is going to give way? Supposedly the elementary walking-to-school leader is supposed to keep everyone in line so that the bicycles can pass. Still, there is the occasional bump... Or the bicycles go out in the street and cause cars to swerve.

This is a "Pick up after your dog!" sign that is directly in front of my house.


And THIS is a "Pick up after your dog!" sign in the empty lot next to my house... Do you think someone is trying to send me a message? (By the way, I DO pick up after my dog.)


This sign is on the main gate of a large lumber factory. Can you figure out what they are trying to say? The trucks are NOT supposed to park in front of the factory before opening hours (that is what that white block is supposed to be... a parked truck) because students walk and ride their bicycles to school along the road.

This sign is fairly new. Why? Because last year a high school boy was riding his bicycle along the road, not looking anywhere but at his bicycle basket and HE crashed into a parked truck! How you could not see a parked truck I don't know. Although the boy suffered minor injuries, an ambulance was called and the factory and the neighborhood and the schools got very upset about early morning trucks. I felt sorry for the poor truck driver. Just minding his business, taking a morning nap in front of the factory before the gate opens and bang, someone crashes into his truck and he gets blamed!

This is a sign right in front of the forest entrance warning hunters that there are houses nearby. MINE to be exact! We are the first house bordering the forest and if any stray bullets are going to come this way they are going to come to our house first. Tetsu thinks this a humorous sign because it says,

"There are houses nearby. Be careful!"

Tetsu wonders if they are warning hunters to be careful of irate house owners. Either way, the sign is so covered with vegetation I don't think anyone will get any message.

I just went out and washed this sign down in honor of today's blog post. This sign is one Tetsu and I put up right across from our driveway. We live on a corner and cars come down the narrow farm road and are in danger of hitting whatever might be coming out of our driveway. (Thus the mirrors... which the city put up so that cars can see around the corner). Children would race out of my driveway after English and many years ago, one child had a near mishap. We put up the sign after that and I also started the custom of making the children look both ways and calling out "Right! Left! Right!" in English before they left my yard. This was even before my crosswalk duty days.

Now, how many of those signs would you understand if you couldn't read Japanese and didn't have my explanation? That is the sign of a good sign!

Donation quilts

Last week when Lorraine visited, she was lugging a suitcase when she came out of the train station.

"I didn't bring any clothes. This is filled with quilts."

Lorraine belongs to a quilting guild in Australia and when they heard that she was coming to Japan again, they sent along A LOT of donation quilts. They had no particular destination in mind. The Tohoku evacuation centers were at one time collecting donation quilts through Quilt Tsushin but no one is sure whether they still need quilts. Mrs. Furui and I donate quilts to the local Ronald McDonald house and Mrs. Furui also makes quilts for the university hospital. Lorraine was hoping that one of these places might find a use for the Australian ladies' quilts.

Actually, there are a lot more quilts still being stored at Lorraine's son's house. Too many for Lorraine to carry herself to my area so we have arranged for Mrs. Okutomi or Mrs. Harada to pick them up the next time they drive in... In the meantime, Lorraine brought what she could and showed them to me.


"Please find some way to use them... The hospital, the Ronald McDonald house, anywhere is fine."

When Tetsu came home that night, he politely admired the Australian quilts. (Tetsu doesn't really understand quilts. They are colorful and they can keep people warm. That's about the extent of his quilt knowledge.) But when Lorraine said that they could be donated anywhere, he spoke up.

"Would anybody mind if I took a quilt or two to the convalescent home? Those would really brighten up some of the rooms."

That's a nice idea, especially because he had given Lorraine a tour around his convalescent home when she visited in February. She could imagine which rooms he might be talking about and who might be admiring the quilts.

In the end, Tetsu took ALL the quilts (seven?) and though I gave him instructions to return any that the staff might not be able to use, NONE of the quilts came back! Staff and residents seem very excited to have all the pretty quilts up on the walls and draped over the sofas.

Ronald McDonald and the hospital will have to wait until someone picks up Lorraine's other quilts. This first batch is not coming back to us...

Mrs. Okutomi's work

My friend Mrs. Okutomi was featured in Patchwork Tsushin this month! Mrs. Okutomi is getting to be quite a well known figure in the Japanese quilting world.

Let's see... 20 some years ago Mrs. Okutomi, Mrs. Furui and I enrolled our eldest children in the kindergarten. Mrs. Okutomi and I were neighbors and she was interested in brushing up her English. I think she had done some clothing sewing and dabbled in a bit of handwork but I suggested we use an English patchwork book and "study" and sew at the same time. We invited Mrs. Furui to join us because Mrs. Furui had done a lot of embroidery and tapestry weaving and her English was excellent (she speaks German as well.)

Our English classes quickly deteriorated as we became more involved in the intricacies of patchwork and machine piecing. This was a new idea in Japan at the time, and roller cutters, cutting mats, flag piecing were unheard of. We had successes and failures but we all had a good time. From those beginnings, began our annual kindergarten quilt raffle which continues to this day.

Mrs. Okutomi moved away a couple of years later but she refined her machine piecing skills and went on to teach classes at local fabric shops. Gradually she branched out into doing paper piecing and stained glass applique. And she kept in touch with Mrs. Furui and me and visited us when she could. Mrs. Okutomi instructed me in my first paper piecing attempt and she mentored me in an applique quilt I made a few years ago of my church. Mrs. Okutomi also developed her machine quilting skills and has taken on the job of quilting our kindergarten raffle quilt for the past couple of years.

As Mrs. Okutomi moved to various parts of Japan she held exhibitions and her creations were regularly featured in magazines. She has been on TV and one of her pieces was shown at a Padacuh quilt festival. In recent years Mrs. Okutomi has depicted Bible scenes and churches in her stained glass applique and she has done a whole series of the places she has traveled in Japan. It was the travel quilts that were featured in this month's magazine.

Mrs. Okutomi does beautiful work and I am proud to be influenced and mentored by her!