Sunday Bento & Obon

Being at home pretty much all day, I made the kids a bento to eat at home. It’s pretty simple as I started on it late and they wanted to eat. I cooked a can of vienna sausage along with the hot dogs as I thought Buddy would prefer that. Turned out that he really really loves crab hot dogs. He ate like three by himself!

I made some penguins too but really didn’t care for them so I left them for Mr. Pikko to eat, lol!

Last night me and the kids went with my father in law and my niece to the Mililani Hongwanji bon dance. They’re a larger temple so they have theirs on two nights. I was so thrilled! It was a monstrous bon dance in a humungous parking lot. Tons of people were dancing and the andagi was soooo fresh and good.

One really cool thing was that Baby Girl felt brave enough to go in and dance without me carrying her. There was a flag dance and she kept saying she wanted to go close and closer until finally I asked if she wanted to go in and she did! We didn’t have flags, but we just did the motions anyway; it was a really fun and easy dance. She really enjoyed it so that was awesome!

Hands down though, the best part was their Fukushima song. Finally after like 7 bon dances in the last two years I find one church that has kids in the middle. They weren’t yelling “betcho!” but something else. Still, the effect was the same. There had to have been a couple hundred people dancing and they had super fast foot movements that I could only manage to do once because it’s rather hard to sidestep and hop from one foot to another while carrying a 30 lb toddler. Baby Girl was content to play with her towels so I took Buddy into the line. He seemed a little perplexed and I saw lots of other people dancing with babies. Around 10 minutes in he starts frowning whenever the kids yelled, which was really cute. A couple minutes later he just put his head on my shoulder and actually SLEPT through the rest of it.

I’ll definitely be going to that one next year as it was the best obon on Oahu I’ve been to by far. Perhaps next year if I remember the season in time, I’ll finally get to go to the granddaddy of obons here: Honpa Hongwanji.