Skipping Town

It was a fun Easter this year. The holidays keep getting more entertaining as Lucia becomes more aware of them, and I know they’ll only get more fun once Greta gets into them, too. This year’s Easter celebration started on Friday, when some friends and I organized an egg hunt for our two-year-olds at the park. Lucia had a great time. While a couple of the other kids preferred to just run around the park, Lucia set out with a singular focus: to collect eggs in her new bunny bucket. She loved finding them; she was less interested in opening them. And, of course, an interesting stick was the best thing of all. Saturday, we went out to Coney Island with friends to play in the sand. Lucia was so excited to be at the beach, and she immediately pulled off her socks and shoes and ran to the water—only to find that it was painfully cold. Once we warmed up her toes and got her shoes back on, she had fun playing in the sand and collecting shells in her bucket. Saturday night, I put together the g...

One of the things that’s always intrigued me about Japan is the prevalence of kawaii—cuteness. It’s everywhere—from the “helping characters” that decorate almost every public sign, to the charms that dangle from everyone’s cell phones, to the stuffed animal prizes in huge “claw” arcade games. Some Japanese teenagers also go for kawaii in the way they dress, though we didn’t get to see the biggest showcase of outfits, which is apparently in Harajuku on Sundays. Next time. Hello Kitty is the biggest player; she’s everywhere, and I got used to seeing her wide-eyed, mouthless face pretty much everywhere we turned. If there was a tourist attraction, there was a Hello Kitty charm or souvenir to go with it, and we saw Kitty dressed as a rickshaw driver, a geisha, a fox (at Fushimi Inari), a deer (at Nara), a leek, a shinkansen (bullet train), a shinkansen stewardess, sitting in the lap of a Buddha, and in various other traditional garb. She graced the packages of snacks and sweets; she appear...