A good day

We had such a lovely day today. This week is our skip week from school (we have 1 week off a month, and no long summer vacation), so the girls played this morning while I planned out school for the next two months and sorted the girls’ work from this month. I have a general plan for the year- what topics/sections we should be on each week to get through all of our material in the year. Sometimes we get slightly behind, sometimes we get stunningly ahead (Tiny is so far past where I scheduled for math). At the beginning of each month I go through and check where we are against where we’ve planned. Then I plan out exactly what pages/activities we’ll do each day. I usually only plan one month ahead, but this time I was on a roll and planned through December. I will be happy with myself at the beginning of December.

When that was done, we headed out to Yoyogi Uhehara to my friend’s house. She was teaching a class for women from church about making sourdough bread. I was there to learn how to make bread, and Z was there on her very first babysitting assignment. (Tiny was her assistant.) One of my other friends has a 2 year old, and she asked Z to keep an eye on her while she (the mom) attended the class. Both girls were SO excited. Z has been wanting a way to earn some money, and she worked hard to earn her little wage.  The class was so fun, and we had a really good turn out. (I say we because I’m in charge of planning activities for the women at church, so this class fell under my purview.) I love hanging out with the women from church, they are such a diverse group, but all so loving and fascinating.

On our way back to the train station, we noticed an interesting roof in the skyline and thought it looked quite a bit like a mosque. So we took a detour and discovered that it was the Tokyo Camii; the mosque we’d already found in January. So we took another look, this time informed by the girls’ new knowledge of Islam and my new interest in calligraphy.

But before we get to the mosque- a picture of a butterfly.
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Ok, here’s the mosque.

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This calligraphy blows me away.

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Z asked about the green lantern in the picture below, so I did some internet research this afternoon. According to the interwebs (which have been known to be unreliable), mosques traditionally have green lights or lanterns, but there is not a specific religious reason. Some sources noted that green is one of the colors people will wear in heaven (based in their scriptures), and that green is, in general, an significant color to the Nation of Islam.

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The design of this calligraphy is so beautiful.

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The sun was coming through the windows today in a way I hadn’t noticed in January- they were breathtaking.

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I’m assuming this is the Koran. There wasn’t anyone we could ask.

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Now we’re at home and the girls are watching Robin Hood. Z is feeling a bit “cold-ish”, sniffly and sore throaty. Hopefully it’s nothing. Soon it will be dinner time, and then bed time, and time for me to read more about yurei (evil ghost spirits). They are some seriously scary stories. As the book says, “knowing what frightens someone is a wonderful window into their personality- wihch makes knowing what frightens an entire nation of people  a powerful tool for understanding what makes them tick.”  And apparently, really angry women really scare the Japanese people.

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