11.17.2005

Sports Day At School

It was raining on Saturday morning so a telephone tree message was generated from school to all of the classes that the sports event that had been scheduled for that day was postponed until Sunday. Of course by the time the call reached us, I had already made our deluxe family picnic lunch, minus the rice part, so we had a nice lunch at home that day.

S had invited the PTA softball colleagues and some of their families over for a sukiyaki dinner to celebrate the childrens' efforts at the sports day. We decided to keep the party plans and they became a pre-event celebration. Including our kids, there were 10 children and 11 adults. We fed the kids first and the adults retreated to S's room for drinks (I made a big batch of Sangria with some Beaujolais Noveau from 3 years ago that the superintendant gave me last week, lots of fruit and some orange liqueur, nobody got sick...) and dinner sitting on the floor around 2 low tables. The kids had the rest of the apartment to themselves and were well behaved. Most of the moms and kids went home around 9:30 to get ready for the next day's sports event (ie. start marinating some more chicken to fry, making those square tamagoyaki omelettes to slice and cutting vegetables to simmer in sweet soy sauce or, for the kids, taking a bath and going to bed). The men sat around and drank more for another hour when the aroma of my cooking for the next day's lunch drove them away and they returned home.

On Sunday, the girls went to school at 8 a.m. and L and I followed a little before 9 with a big bag filled with our picnic mat, lunch, lots of tea and the video camera. S showed up at 9:30, after all the boring opening speeches and stretches, to take over the video taping duties from me. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the digital camera recharger, so we didn't take any photos. We can probably stop the videos in a few choice places and upload images later.

The girls all had fun, not worrying too much about winning or losing, but were glad to have the next day off (a make-up day for Sunday) to rest after all the excitement.

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