Making Ohagi

For this week's Sunday Surprise, we made ohagi. Ohagi is a Japanese sweet made with sweet sticky rice (the kind used to make mochi) and sweet azuki (red bean) paste.

We start out by cooking the sticky rice, then pounding it.

Then you take small handfuls of the pounded rice and roll them into balls.

From there, you can make two different styles of ohagi. The first way is to flatten a ball of rice and put a spoonful of the sweet azuki paste on top.

Then roll the rice around the bean paste so that the azuki ends up inside the ball of rice.

After that, the ball of rice with the azuki paste inside is then rolled on a plate of kinako, a roasted whole soy flour.

The finished product has the kinako powder on the outside covering the sticky rice, and hidden inside is the sweet bean paste.

The other style of ohagi is prepared by spreading the sweet bean paste and then putting the ball of sticky rice on top.

Then you roll the paste around the rice ball.

The final product is a ball of sweet bean paste with sticky rice inside.

Both styles are a sweet treat, and the three of us liked it both ways. We also took some over to my dad and he enjoyed it as well.

Sunday Surprise: Making Christmas Ornaments

We began the Sunday Surprise program last weekend to try to help get Kai more accustomed to unplanned activities so that he will eventually be better able to tolerate unexpected events. We thought long and hard about what our second Sunday Surprise would be, and it wasn't until Saturday afternoon that we decided.

My wife was in a craft store and saw a demonstration of people decorating Christmas ornaments and thought that would be a fun family activity. So she bought all the stuff we would need: several clear plastic ornament balls, glue, various colors of paint, glitter glue, and sparkles/glitter.

The basic idea is that you take the clear ornament balls and put glue inside of them...

Then you spread the glue around by shaking the ornament...

You then put sprinkles or glitter inside the ball and continue shaking to spread it all around. Alternatively, instead of glue, you can put paint inside the ball and shake that up. You can also use glitter glue. If you'd like, you can decorate the outside of the ornament ball with either stickers or a marker.

I used mostly paint inside my ornaments while my wife made several nice ones using glue and various aprinkles/glitter inside.

Kai put green paint inside his ornaments and then decorated the outside of them with a marker.

Yes, you see correctly - he made biohazard bombs. After all, nothing says "Merry Christmas" like a biohazard bomb.

I think he enjoyed the activity, but after making just two of those, he didn't want to do any more. So, my wife and I made the rest of the ornaments.

Ah well, it was probably better that way. After all, how many biohazard bombs can you put on one Christmas tree?

Sunday Surprise

Unexpected events is one of Kai's primary challenges. He likes it when things go according to plan and struggles when things do not, as is often the case in life.

At school, he still gets upset when there is a fire drill or when special events cause things to deviate from the normal routine. At home, he likes to plan out and write down his daily schedule.

A social worker that we have been seeing suggested that we could try to address this by setting up fun, unexpected events on weekends to have Kai realize that unexpected events do not necessarily lead to unpleasant outcomes, and have him practice dealing with these situations. The idea is that my wife and I would plan something fun - it could be an activity, a new meal, really anything - but we would not tell Kai too far ahead of time so that it would be a surprise for him.

Today we had our first Sunday Surprise.

I did tell Kai yesterday that we would start these Sunday Surprises and explained what we were hoping to accomplish.

He was not happy about it.

He wanted to know what the surprise would be. He said he wanted to plan for it and put it in his schedule. I explained again that we wouldn't tell him because we wanted him to get used to dealing with unexpected events.

Today, he got more anxious. I did tell him in the morning that the Surprise would be an activity we would do as a family and gave him a heads up on the time. We would leave the house at 10:30. But he was not happy that he did not have more information about where we would go or what we would do. He started yelling that he had enough stress in his life and this was adding to it.

Finally, when it was time to leave, we told him where we were headed. We would go to nearby Evanston, home of Northwestern University, and walk around the lakefront and look for Pokémon. After that, we would go to a great burger joint where they had special french fries and milk shakes.

He finally seemed somewhat happy.

It was a beautiful fall day with unseasonably warm temperatures. It was a perfect day to get out and walk around.

The lakefront by the Northwestern campus was really beautiful. There is a nice big park and all along the rocky shore, students have created graffiti art.

My wife had never been to this part of Evanston before and enjoyed seeing the Northwestern campus. Kai just enjoyed playing Pokémon Go.

Afterward we went to another part of town to have lunch at Edzo's. We each had their famous milkshakes - Kai had Oreo, my wife had coffee, while I had hot fudge. Kai had already eaten the cherry and whipped cream on top by the time I snapped this photo.

Kai also had a Chicago-style hot dog which he enjoyed. My wife and I had burgers which we both loved. We also had the garlic fries - very garlic-y which was a good thing if you like garlic.

As we were leaving I asked Kai how he liked the first Sunday Surprise. He said it was better than he thought it would be. And he was happy because he caught a lot of Pokémon.

It will be interesting to see if this type of experience every week helps him deal with other unplanned events. But it can't hurt to practice it. And so far we are off to a good start.