Our first night and day back, after being away two weeks for summer vacation, has been a bit of a trial by fire. The minute we stepped off the plane, into the tunneled walkway, we were seared by the intense Tokyo heat. Let's not even bother complaining about the long, tedious trip from Narita, with the baby who refuses to nap on planes in tow. Walking back to the apartment from the station, my heart sank as the sound of cicadas blared from the trees (I'd hoped they'd all be dead by the time I returned) and their whitened corpses littered the ground around us. The horrible thing about dying cicadas is that if you walk too close to the fallen ones, they can suddenly spring back to life, and somehow their dying wish always seems to be to get tangled in my hair, while they claw and scream. During the elevator ride up to our floor, a cloud of mosquitoes went after me with a vengeance and my skin, which had finally started to heal, is now peppered with fresh red bumps.

The next day, let's see, what did we have? Mud-throwing tantrum while at the playground far from home? Check. Crazy bleeding nose from finger up nose that coated R's entire face, both of my hands and arms, and all our clothing, of course. Check. Toilet tank going wonky and me trying to explain the situation in bad Japanese to apartment management? Check. Pee on the carpet? Check. Poop on the floor (actually, it just barely landed on the edge of the toilet seat, which I treated as a huge triumph, because it means R actually told me correctly that she needed to use the toilet and about two seconds earlier would have possibly gotten her stuff in the right place, yay)? Check.

I guess that's about it. The day is in fact only half over, though, so there could be more in store for me.