Okinawa Through The Eyes Of The Rockstars – Ocean Expo Park and Churaumi Aquarium

Oh look, giant whale shark swimming thru Rockstar’s arms. What, like it’s hard to get a whale through your arms?

This would be a high-five over lunch but rays don’t have fingers

Family selfie with zzz-ed Miss who didn’t make it past the playground initially

There now she’s fully awake (we waited awhile)

The Japanese-speaking family sitting nearby with a little girl who looks to be about 9 or 10 helps us bag the prime window seat. The little girl moves the stroller so we can move tables and when I thank her profusely she needs to get back to us after her parents have schooled her how to pronounce “thank you” in English.

I might bitch about immigration (in fact I will later – we’re just back home) but nothing affects my impression of traveling in this place as greatly as this little girl does. They never get a window seat. At my invitation she shyly comes over to our table to take a few pictures during whale/ray feeding times before indicating she’s had enough and moving back to her own table where her parents and older brother (who looks to be in his lower teens) are seated.

Here’s a few more blurry indoor aquarium shots:

“Hee hee hee” Rockstar shares a joke with this puffer

(Rockstar asked me to take a picture of this cross section of anemone)

Rockstar of course loves the deep sea section, complete with relevant temperatures – given his previous animal learning unit in school, we can have a conversation about Darwin’s theory of evolution and how deep sea creatures evolve to suit their surroundings of pitch darkness, heavy water pressure and the cold….

Then out into the open for a few “nicer” pictures…

As always, it feels really painful when we first travel to a new, unfamiliar place just the 4 of us. Screaming or huffy kids (WHY do we have such willful children???), the smell of rancid milk vomit (Little Miss can empty her stomach almost on demand), multiple wake-ups some nights, the whole being responsible for two little human beings, the care, feeding and vomit deterrent of.

As always (even though it never feels like it at first), we eventually get over it. Learn to work better together at handling the kids as a team.

And Rockstar goes from really bad at putting her Shoo Shoes back on to Not Bad At All.

(Little Miss interestingly sits patiently as long as Rockstar takes to put on her shoes. And sometimes it took awhile. This is something, because otherwise she loooves bugging him – at bedtime we might snap at her to stop making noises to keep him from falling asleep (his bedtime is stricter than hers which she knows, because he will eventually go back to school where he can’t nap during the day whereas she is free to nap as she pleases) and she will agreeably “Shh” along with me… or shush me..… then brazenly and silently pounce onto Rockstar before we can stop her.)

People are smiling and no one is high. I WILL call this an achievement!

We went to the Ocean Expo Park twice. The first trip was like we were the Stooges – except it really wasn’t funny. Rockstar was huffy, Little Miss bruised her head going down a slide, and why is it every other parent in Okinawa has it more together than you do? For real though, the huge rope playground boasts just one elderly guard that I can see in the immediate area and some of the absolutely best behaved kids running and climbing freely about in a playground that I’ve seen in a long time – much better behaved than Funzone in HK and our housing area clubhouses etc. Excited Rockstar runs off at one point and I raise my voice to call him back to tell him something – and the guard is immediately at my side discreetly with a mildly concerned look on his face before relaxing when he realizes I’m just talking to Rockstar.

The second trip…………………

The feeling when you drive off into the proverbial sunset, Asahi beer (mine) and Starbucks latte (Kings’ – he’s the driver as always) in hand, happy, contented kids wearing freshly changed clothes and munching wholesome snacks in car seats, is what the whole trip is really about. That’s why we pack the circus out.

Yes this is a picture of some of the coffees in their vending machine. The one with pink flowers is sweetened with Okinawan sugar. I… KNOW. There exists Okinawan sugar???

I hate the “tough bits”. I’m someone who can’t stand food dropped on the table/ floor and have to fight the repeated urge to wipe it up, or snotty noses, and will wake at the slightest sound in the night (can you imagine sleeping next to squirming, gabbling little children?) so believe you me the “tough bits” would really, really have bothered the old me. I wish I knew an easier way and I could blog that. But I know no other way except through sheer hard work (except that through sheer hard work it doesn’t feel that hard work in the end).

I don’t know how to get better at the parenting thing until I’ve had a few “tough bits”. It’s like when you’re going running or swimming and the starting laps are the worst, and then you hit your stride and your body starts to do it without hurting too much because it has to, or you will quite simply die.

So what if you never put that amount of work in and just never hit your stride when it comes to your kids? What if you’re always stuck at the first few painful laps, and you miss out on when it gets easier? That would keep one going, right?

I have this girlfriend – I’ve always thought she’s so much more delicate than me – maybe 4, 5 inches shorter (she’s gonna kill me when she reads this :D) and 20lbs lighter – she navigates heavy traffic between Butterworth and Georgetown every work day with two boys aged about 7 and 2.5. One day while back there I watched my friend calmly mix her squirming toddler’s formula and hand him the bottle at the next traffic light without batting an eyelid. Two lights later she lightly rinsed the bottle out the car window into a ditch and refilled the bottle with fresh drinking water. How many times was she stuck in traffic with someone screaming in her ear before she got that good? There are mums who do this, this parenting thing like this every single day AND I DON’T EVEN DRIVE.

That’s the other lesson I learnt – to look at the people who inspire you to do better, in whichever way. (Not the ones who make you do worse. If you realized you had a choice, why would you choose to be around people who don’t bring out the best in you?)

And so a few more pics of The Rockstars jumping and climbing about at the Ocean Expo (Little Miss thought it was hilarious to be bounced about on the net – to some mildly approving glances from Japanese-speaking parents around because she was obviously the tiniest one in this play area meant for 3-6 year olds. I would watch other parents gently coax their younger ones up these things as well, instead of say, leave them to not try it) and then I better shoot this out first and go do all the stuff I need to do when we get back…