Happy new iyaaa yo!

Iyaaaa yo! is a favorite phrase of my son's and basically means "nooooo!!!!!" he uses it in a variety of situations and at various times of the day, it never ceases to get on my nerves.

Anyway, I hope you all had a lovely new year break! We're nearing the end of a week of the 3 of us being together, and do you know, by some miracle, it has been a very peaceful and enjoyable holiday! Usually I dread extended periods of time where Ryota is off work because of the bickering and general annoyance of having an extra body around the house making a mess, but this time has been good! We got into oosouji early and spent a solid 3 days of hard core sorting, throwing away and cleaning. And it was all the cleaning that I usually can't be arsed doing, like wiping the grime off the insides of window panes and stuff, gross, but very satisfying once it was all done. Of course Ryota being the hoarder that he is started to go through my rubbish bags and I kept hearing exclamations of "why are you throwing THIS away?!" and "hmmm I'm sure I could yahoo auction this..." I became a total annoying Japanese wife and made him stop immediately, I enforced a rule that unless he sells or finds a place for the things he wanted to keep that we would never use, it was going. He agreed and stashed a whole heap of crap in the back of the car that he claims he's going to sell. I'm so chucking it out after he goes to work tomorrow.

We didn't do too much over our break, lots of cleaning, a bit of shopping, a temple trip to ask the gods to give my baby 10 fingers, 10 toes and less of a tendency for tantrums unlike his/her big brother, and a lot of relaxing and going out for dinner. Not helping my expanding waistline but loving not having to cook!

As for my stalker, no more phone calls or comments, so unknown, if you're still reading: thank you for your apology, and for you know, not stalking me anymore... Thank you for all your lovely comments and support as well, I seriously considered stopping blogging for 2012 but am very glad I didn't. Let's not be too harsh on unknown either, if it was a genuine apology then I'm grateful, we all go through rough patches and some people take it out in different ways, I've heard this guy's voice and he sounds like he could be an intelligent, articulate person, I just hope whatever he was going through is better. Hell we all go a bit nuts sometimes, my nuts moment was in the midst of my heavy drinking days after I downed a bottle of vodka from the conbini and ventured to my local park intending to kill myself, of course i passed out before I could even give it a crack, plus Japanese parks aren't exactly death traps, but it was a pretty dark moment! So yeah, New year, new start and all that eh!

So far 2012 has started off well for me, not too many resolutions... do a 10km run after the baby is born, here's hoping I'm not still bleeding all over the course! Eww, sorry, but it's true...
One bit of sad news I can't stop thinking about is my friend who was due to have her baby at the end of this month has just found out that her baby won't live after he is born. Heartbreaking, and of course me being a dickhead who had no idea, sent her a happy new year mail saying "our babies will be born in the same year, they can be friends!" you know those times where you just wish so hard that you could take something you said or wrote back? Yeah totally one of those. I really feel for my friend and just don't know what to say to make her feel better.

But apart from that, things are going well, Ash is as genki as ever, Ryota's grumpy level is set on low for now and I've finally got some energy back after months of feeling permanently like I wanted to sleep 24 hours a day.
I hope 2012 will be a great year for you all, I'm looking forward to reading everyone's blogs, hopefully finding new blogs, and writing lots myself!

Happy new year!