Shiori and her friend

Like I mentioned in my previous post.. I tried to find as much opportunity as I can for Shiori to mingle with some other kids. This way she is really encouraged to speak Japanese and japanese only if she wants to play with them. We found there is a new bus service in my home town leaving near my place and does loop of all the places that we'd like to visit.. I took advantage of this bus service to visit many places with Shiori. One of them is this building that has all the kid's play stuff.. We must've visited this place at least 3 times..

First time we visited, I guess since it was week day, there weren't too many people around, but it was actually good for Shiori as she sometimes get overwhelmed when there are lots of people.

She was playing by herself for awhile, but she quickly found a girl probably little younger than her to play some cooking game..

Sharing some food that she made, and then started to share toys together. I stayed away from them observing from far..

And then they started to play some hide and seek and catch.. going down slides together
After awhile I spoke to this kid's mom.. just to explain that we live in Australia and that I am just encouraging Shiori to play with other kids and speak Japanese.. just in case she was wondering why Shiori's Japanese wasn't as good as kids at her age should be.. or why this girl is always hanging around and I'm not doing anything. The mother of this girl was so nice, she was really happy to see her daughter playing with Shiori.. and she was also constantly involved in their game. She said Shiori's Japanese was fine.


I took many things back from this trip with Shiori.. and confidence in Shiori to speak Japanese and ability to make friends with what little Japanese she knows is one of them. One of those moment that I'm glad I stuck with speaking some Japanese with her though it was very hard.