Posted by Jess
11 August 2010

Today our stuff arrived!  Hooray!  The delivery man came and gave us 19 wonderful boxes of all shapes and sizes.  So happy to have our things and make this place a little more of a home.  The process was a bit crazy.  As he delivered the boxes, we worked to unpack them, since he was going to take the boxes and packing materials back with him (that way we didn't have to worry about disposing of it ourselves).  We did well for the first few boxes while he made a few trips back to the truck.  But then he caught up to us and the craziness began!   We just started dumping everything onto the table and on beds and wherever we could.  All in all, it took about an hour to get everything dumped out and then the rest of the day to get it to the right rooms and pretty well organized.  Jason and I finished around 9pm last night (with just a few organizational needs keeping us from completely getting done). 

Here are some pictures from the process:

while we still had time to take pix as he was unloading...

I will post photos soon of the apartment now that we've officially moved in.  We got everything to fit with a little creativity (to be shown with the future pics) and I am so glad that I brought the fabric totes along - best thing ever for all the toys and they took up no room in our shipment. 

The only other thing we did on Wednesday was go to a local baby store and get a baby gate.  We desperately needed one for the kitchen.  It's a walk-thru kitchen with a pocket door on one end, but the other side is open to the dining/living room.  The main problem is that the oven and broiler are right at Abby's height with all the buttons and lights right at her level. 

The baby store is called Akachan Honpo <>.  It's in a different part of Tokyo than we've been to so far and took about 20 minutes to get there by train.   We took Abby in the Kelty Backpack which was awesome!  So much easier to navigate down the stairs to the train station and she was really happy on the train in it too (she doesn't usually last very long sitting on my lap).  It ended up being a long walk from the train station to the store too so the backpack definitely helped for that and Ella took a ride on my shoulders.  We got to the store and found the gate we needed, plus some bubbles and a bag for the back of the umbrella stroller.  On the way out we got a lot smarter and took the free shuttle from the building the store is in to the train station - piece of cake! 

They do have Toys R Us and Babies R Us here in Japan, but this store was a little closer and we figured a baby gate is a baby gate, right?  It worked out well and the gate is perfect - although it makes Abby really mad :)  We were definitely in a part of town where not a lot of foreigners go - we were the only non-Japanese in the area.  The nice thing about Tokyo is that the crime rate is really (really) low, so you never have to worry about being in a bad neighborhood or anything - they are all just as safe as hanging out at our house in Ramsey.  We just have to worry about getting lost - which as long as we can find a subway station or a taxi, we can always get home! 

So Wednesday was a day of making our apartment "home".  And so far so good.  The girls are so excited to have their toys and they are much more content.  I loved having all of my own things in the shower and bathroom this morning and of course we had mac and cheese for lunch.

Kanpai!
Jess