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I mentioned in Anthony's First All-by-Himself Letter a few days ago that while writing his first full-fledged note all by himself, he'd made a grammar mistake in writing the わ sound as わ when, due to its grammatical use in the sentence, it should have been written as は. The alphabet is remarkably regular, with only a few special rules like this. Few as they are, they need to be learned and absorbed, so we lightly mentioned it to him in passing.

I didn't expect it to be something that he really "got" for a while, but he wrote it [...]

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The old pictures of Anthony swinging in the park two years ago that I posted last week reminded me of some foliage photos I took on that same outing early in Kyoto's 2006 fall-foliage season. So, I thought I'd use them to kick off Part III of my Kyoto Fall Foliage Preview (prior installments: Part I - Part II).

I was sitting on my bicycle with the wind howling when I tried to get the shot of the leaf... very hard to get, much less hold, focus.

The "nearby photos" link under the picture above brings you to a lot [...]

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Anthony has never really shown any interest in reading and writing (nor, for that matter, much interest even in being read to). It's been almost a year since he could write his name in English and in Japanese, but that's about as far as he's cared to take it. As I've written before (How To Raise a Bilingual Child and More on Raising a Bilingual Child), I am careful not to ram linguistics down his throat, lest he turn away from it.

Many of Anthony's peers can read and write fairly well, but still, at his age (a week [...]

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