Making Progress

I said that I wanted to have some printables up in a few days, and start using my calendar by the first of the month. You know, 3 days ago. I'm not there. Life is, as always, more interesting than I anticipate. But we are making progress, and that means we're getting closer to doing our Japanese calendar time. And that, in my book, is success, even if it is slower success than I had originally hoped. (I should have known better; that goal was set 4 days before my youngest brother married his high school sweet heart and we had tons of family in for a while, and then Tigress got bronchitis. We're not doing too bad.)

So. We're finally at the point of assembling the various pieces of the calendar that I've been making and assembling. Turns out that building a Japanese calendar is a little tricky. First, we had to find an actual calendar. One that fits the trifold board I got (we have no wall space; this way I can put it away), and that has no English on it. I ended up finding one that had small labels for the days of the week, I cut off the labels, and decided to reattach the decorative border. A little contact paper over the whole thing, and you almost can't tell that it's been adapted. I made a label: カレンダー, which will be vertical, next to the calendar. Partly because it fits there, partly because in Japanese vertical writing is common.

The little ones are pretty interested in the whole process, particularly after I got out the screaming yellow board I'm mounting it on. Which is all good in my book: the more curious they are, the more excited they'll be when it's finally time to get started using it. I have owls for the days of the month. I think I'm going to just hand-write the numbers on them. I might have made a printable, but the owls were cute... and easy. I'm also working on building a Thing for a week's worth of weather. This has turned out to be more drama than I had bargained for, but it's making progress. That, I do have a partly ready printable, but it's still got a little more that I need to get done. We'll also be working on a song, probably starting with this one because the kids ask for it all.the.time. Even Tigress says, "shu-shu. shu-shu." My kids love the "go-shu-shu song." And hey, brushing teeth is a good thing in any language!

At this point, I want to start doing at least a very bare-bones version of this in the next day or two. Doing less than my goal will be annoying, and will remind me that I need to figure out what I'm doing with the rest of the calendar and get that made up.

 That's what we're up to!