The sun rose at 4:49 this morning here in Kyoto. Ugh.
It was the first time so far this year that the sun rose before 5:00am. Unfortunately, it won't be the last -- the sunrise gets steadily earlier until it hits 4:42am and stays there for most of June. It won't rise during the 5:00 hour again until late July.
The picture to the right is from my GPS unit, which can compute the theoretical sunrise/sunset data for any point on earth. The point in question today is my apartment.
All this early sunrise stuff is unfortunate because Anthony tends to rise with the sun, and (now here's the unfortunate part) I tend to rise with my son. I'm on morning duty, so when he does his doody, it's me he wakes up to clean things up (change diaper, or wipe butt).
This early waking-up stuff goes on despite my best attempts to hermetically seal his room from all photons. His body just seems to know it's light outside.
On the left, we have the young man himself.
After having been up for three hours, he's about to head out to preschool. He's got his backpack, a bento lunch Fumie made for him this morning (in the red Curious George bag), and his as-of-late most-prized possession, a thermos full of tea.
He's very excited about “bento days” like today. Starting next week he'll bring his lunch every day, but so far the days have generally been short (ending before noon), with only a few days like today that run long enough to need to have lunch there. The whole point is that they're starting slowly, since many kids aren't used to being away from Mom.
When he got home (Fumie took him and picked him up), we talked at length about the bento. As part of his lunchbox he has spoon, fork, and chopsticks, but he said that he used only the chopsticks. That's hard to believe, but the clean cutlery bore that out. (He did mention later that he'd used his fingers for the mushrooms.) He enjoyed it very much, and as such, we enjoyed hearing about it.
Fumie puts a lot of work into the planning and execution of these lunches, because she knows that'll make or break the whole school experience for him. I think she's hit a home run.