Busy day - Japanese soft play centres are fab.

So last night was slightly better. Tom waited until midnight to wake up and was screaming for about an hour before he fell asleep again. It was a shame as I could hear that he was awake before he started to scream, and could hear him trying to get to sleep again, but something was keeping him awake. In the end he ended up in bed with me with my arm around him to get him to sleep. Matt didn't do too well either, I'm still snoring and that keeps him awake. Not sure what we can do about that - it is impossible to stop myself from snoring.

Today we decided to keep to Tom's normal schedule as much as possible. So we were up at 7am, breakfast at 8 (a whole banana, a adult sized yogurt and most of a slice of toast - greedy thing), nap at 9.30, wake at 10.30 then we left the house. Today's destination was Bornelund in Kobe - a soft play area for children. It w as fantastic, puts the English ones to shame. It had an area especially for babies, a mirror room, a shadow room, dressing up area, pretend house area, the biggest pool pit I've ever seen and a big slide and large foamy play bits, much like you get at Gymbabes. There were also two huge inflatable doughnut things. It was fantastically clean and very empty.

Tom had a fantastic time, he loved the baby area, with all the musical instruments, especially getting them all out and then crawling off for me to put back again. He also loved a big peg board with lots of different coloured pegs which he could pull out. Was fantastic standing practice for him. He did lots of crawling, through tunnels, over wedges, in the blown up doughnuts etc. Certainly ex

pended lots of energy. We left for lunch(Tom's first experience of Japanese baby food which went down well - he ate the whole lot. Interesting the portion size of baby food for a 9 month old Japanese baby is smaller than at home) He also enjoyed my lunch, eating most of my roll (He just loves Japanese bread) and quite a bit of a pumpkin salad that was on my plate.

We returned to Bornelund after lunch for more antics, including spending a lot of time in the girls house playing with dolls and trying to get a new mum through charm - he almost succeeded! He certainly isn't shy in going up to mums and babies to play. The other babies tend to just watch him in bewilderment! We left at 2pm as he was getting tired. We managed to keep him awake for the journey home and put him to bed as soon as we got in. Matt also went for a lie down, so I spent an hour and a half on my own (not done that in a long time). Managed to read a good bit of a magazine which was lovely.

Once Matt was awake I ventured down to the local shop to buy some milk. I took an educated guess as there was no English at all on any of the cartons that looked like they could contain milk. Brought it back to find that my instincts were right - phew. Tom had a happy late afternoon, playing, being hugged by Hiromi (at last he allowed her to do so) and eating - another Japanese meal - tofu burger in sauce with some veg which went down without any coercion. Then it was bath, bottle and bed. Haven't heard from him yet...