PRIORITY 01
Midnight Ice Cream and Chips Weren’t Weak Willpower: Sleep Deprivation and Weight (A Serious One)
Sleeping 1.2 hours more a day cut calorie intake by 270 kcal. Gaining weight while raising a baby is not weak willpower — it is physiology.
NAGOYA, JP/LOG 25/
A dad, two kids,
fighting insomnia
Evidence-based parenting from a dad engineer.Practical guides and local tips from Nagoya.
二児パパ、生存中 ／ ALSO IN JAPANESE
SCROLL ／ down into the small hours
TOOLS
Tools you can use right now
Three single-page tools. Your input is processed inside your browser — never sent to or stored on a server.
All three tools are Japanese-only, but they run on dates and numbers and may still be worth a translate button.
TOOLChild allowance & leave benefit calculatorFor when you want the number before you finish reading the city hall booklet.TOOLVaccination date plannerFor the intervals after the two-month shots, where a wrong date costs money.TOOLPost-birth paperwork timelineFor the birth registration and allowance deadlines you should not be counting at 3AM.
FEATURED
If you read three
Not sure where to start? These three show this blog's balance of evidence and real life best.
PRIORITY 02
All My 3 a.m. Searching Left Me Was Anxiety: A Reading Order for Parenting Information
An hour of searching at 3 a.m. left me nothing but anxiety. The problem wasn't the amount of information — it was the order. Five sources, five jobs.
PRIORITY 03
Why Talk to Someone Who Can't Talk Back? The Answer From 102 Trials
102 trials across 33 countries say talking to your baby works — and the biggest change showed up on the parents' side. You respond to the signals they send.
METHOD
How I make this site
Not every post here is built the same way. An evidence post, a family story and an outing guide each earn your trust from a different place — so here is where each one keeps its proof.
01RESEARCH
Look it up
I start with the papers, not with a hunch.
For the evidence posts, that means peer-reviewed studies and official guidelines. For an outing, it means the venue’s own page — opening hours, prices, whether there’s a nursing room.
02CHECK
Check it myself
I don’t take a source at its word.
When two sources disagree, I say so. And before I write about a place, I go there with the kids and see how it actually goes.
03EXPERIENCE
Live with it
Then: how did it go in our house?
What worked, and what fell apart at 3am. I write both down. That last part is the evidence only this blog can offer.
JOURNEY
The parenting journey
From pregnancy to "beyond" — the whole road of early parenting as one walkable 3D path. Stroll it with your family characters and each stage offers what to know, do, get, and where to go. If you've saved a birthday, you start at "you are here".
Walk the journeyPREGNANCY → 0–6M → 6–12M → 1–2Y → 2–3Y → BEYOND
05 ORBITS
Five orbits
Start with a failure, check it against the evidence, survive it with some piece of gear, and end up back on a street in northern Nagoya. Roughly in that order.
07Parenting Fails育児の失敗談12Evidence-Basedエビデンス育児01Gear育児グッズ04Nagoya Outings名古屋おでかけ01Raising Kids Bilingual英語で子育て
Written by Nijipapa in Kita-ku, Nagoya. About this blog · 日本語のトップへ
FIELD NOTES
Recently explored
Places around northern Nagoya we've actually been with the kids.
Meijo Park's "Kodomo no Hiroba" Works From Age Zero. I Went and Looked at the Fenced Area at 5:51 a.m.
Eight photos: the fenced 0–2 area on the north side of Ofuke Pond, stroller parking just outside it, and "CAUTION: HOT" printed on a slide. All of it free.
"Out-of-City Visitors: Reservation Required" Nearly Made Me Close the Tab. How to Get Into Komaki Kodomo Miraikan From Nagoya
You can go from outside Komaki, but holidays are booking-only at 400 yen a head. The smartphone-only lottery opens 31 days out. All worked out before we go.FIELD NOTEWeekend Outings from Meijo Koen Station: Every Spot We Actually Go To (Outdoor, Indoor, Mostly Free)
With a three-year-old and a baby in tow: a free sewer museum five minutes from the station, a zoo that's free for kids, and a hangar of planes in Toyoyama.LATEST UPDATES
What's new
Small site updates, one line at a time.
The homepage got a full redesign — start from the new "What do you need right now?" cards.
The Parenting Journey is live — a walkable 3D path from pregnancy to beyond, family in tow. Saved a birthday? You start at "you are here".Walk it
A list of what you can actually claim during pregnancy — 25 freebies and perks, sorted by whether everyone gets one or it's a lottery, each linking to the official page.See the list
Added 14 product write-ups with real photos and Rakuten links to the 3D virtual room.See the room
ABOUT
The person behind this
Hi — I go by Nijidad (二児パパ). I grew up in the U.S. and studied engineering through grad school at UCLA; these days I’m a chemical engineer raising two kids in Nagoya.
This site combines an engineer’s curiosity about evidence with the considerably messier reality of actually being a dad.
- Father of two
- Chemical engineer
- UCLA BS · MS
- Nagoya
- JA/EN bilingual