Green Tea, Aroshka, Books, TV

I think about writing something about everyday things quite often, but keep putting it off. I guess if there was something grand to talk about, it’ll be easy to come up with the words, but my life at this point is pretty ordinary. And you know what, this is a good thing!

Nonetheless, here are some things I want to jot down.

Green Tea and Milk

When we were in Japan I realized that I am quite in love with green tea. I drank it in huge quantities there, and ever since returning home I consume about one and a half liters (or more) of this fabulous drink per day. I used to drink all my teas with milk (yes, ALL gazillion billion kinds of them) because to me they tasted too watery and flavorless without dairy. Japan changed this, and I am quite happy about this development. I went from consuming 1 gallon of milk per week to about 1/4 gallon — I even stopped buying milk for myself, and just drink from Aroshka’s carton of whole organic milk. Aroshka is not big on milk drinking by the way. He gets some in his morning kasha and with his evening tea, but that’s about it (we’re talking about cow’s milk, not mine).

I also realized that I like Japanese green tea in particular. I drink other kinds of green tea as well (jasmine, rose, pear flavored ones are among my favorite), but when I ran out of the teas that we brought from Japan, I knew I had to get more of them. Luckily, you can get almost anything with the help of the Internet nowadays. I ordered three different kinds of green tea from Hibiki-an, and 8 days later a package from Kyoto has arrived. All I want to say for now is that two teas that I’ve opened — Organic Gyokuro and Organic Genmaicha Matcha-iri — are excellent. I might write a bit more about the teas and my favorite tea-maker (Danya’s New Year present) in a separate post.

What I am also happy about is that Danya likes Japanese green tea as well. He prefers to drink black tea with lemon and sugar, but he drinks green tea straight up, which in my mind is an additional bonus (he really has a sweet tooth when it comes to drinks).

Arosha’s Crib Escape

A few days ago Arosha has figured how to climb out of his crib. Luckily, we saw it on a baby monitor, and were able to stop him from completing the grand escape unsupervised. Here is a short video of his technique.

I was afraid that unless we do something, he might hurt himself while climbing out. Our friends told us that they just forbade their daughter from climbing out and she listened. I doubt that this approach would have worked with Aroshka (he is not mature enough and is pretty stubborn). Some people put some sort of tent on top of a crib, and it prevents toddlers form climbing out. I am not ruling out this option yet. And some people just transfer their children to a toddler bed. We decided to go this route since our crib is convertible, and so far the first two nights were normal. We had some issues with nap the first day (he did not want to fall asleep and kept climbing out of the bed), but today he napped happily for 3 hours.

To be honest, I am much more concerned about Arosha’s transition from nursing-to-sleep (or almost sleep) to NOT nursing-to-sleep. This has been on my mind for at least a few months now, but I am still not sure how to best approach the transition. He just loves to nurse, and I don’t know how to help him to learn to fall asleep by himself. I hope that in the next few months he will become less and less attached to nursing (and by the way, I believe that my milk still has a lot of great stuff in it), and I’ve decided to wean him around his second birthday (I don’t think that he well give it up by himself).

Books

After reading a very favorable review of “The Magicians” by Lev Grossman, I’ve decided that I would enjoy it too. It was OK, and I even bought the sequel, but somehow I can’t bring myself to read more than a few pages of this book at a time. I am not sure why Grossman’s magical world did not suck me in, but the fact remains that I am not drawn to reading, so it’ll probably take me another month or two to finish “The Magician King”.

TV

We’re re-watching Star Trek: Enterprise now. We watched it over 5 years ago for the first time. Sadly, my opinion about the show did not change — it’s not bad, but it does not come close to other Star Treks either (we did not watch the Original Series, so I am not talking about them here). This show is not too engaging or thought-provoking, but it is relaxing nonetheless. Too bad I know that they’ll screw some characters at the end (we’re at the 3rd season right now).

Sometimes, when we have dinner early, we watch “How I Met Your Mother” or “The Big Bang Theory” on TV. Those shows are pretty funny, and I usually enjoy watching them. We might watch them on DVD when they finish filming them.

What I would really like to watch is “Mad Men” or “Game of Thrones”. We watched the first four seasons of the “Mad Men” last year, and I really loved this show. I think we’ll hold off from watching the rest of the show until it is fully finished. As for the “Game of Thrones”, we did not watch a single episode, but we heard a lot of good things about it, so I have pretty high expectations. Since at the moment only one season is out, we’ll hold off watching this one for a while as well.

My Weight

I’ve mentioned before, but I’ve lost some weight since our Japan trip. I used to be around 172-175 lbs in November, and now it’s 158-160. I love being on a skinnier side of my weight spectrum — the clothes look better, and I feel more confident about myself overall (especially when I have a touch of make up and freshly washed hair). Yay to loosing all the baby weight and then some! I think that the weight loss is a combined effect of green tea drinking, overall healthy eating, running after Aroshka and breastfeeding. And I started to sleep more in the last 5-6 months, which is great too.

I think about having another baby pretty often. Not that we’re planning to yet, but it seems like every other girl I know is expecting. The news about future babies make me excited, but a tad jealous at the same time. Is there ever a good time to have a baby? Is it every easy?