At the end of my previous post, about Taketomi Island in the far south of Japan, we'd stopped at a cafe for cake and coffee.

I felt bad that we inadvertently chased him out of his home. When he returned to the beach, we put his shell back near him, and left him alone.

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After getting ready for Santa, Anthony went to bed at about 8:30pm. I happened to wake up a bit before 4am and noticed that Anthony was already up, had already confirmed that Santa had visited, had already opened the small present he's allowed to open when he wakes up, had played with it, grown tired of it, and was entertaining himself with a video. At 3:55am.

With effort, against his protests of "I'm not tired!", I got him back to bed, and soon he was sleeping again. Me too.

We had a nice little presents time, with Fumie's folks stopping [...]

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Kanji are the complex "Chinese characters" of Japanese writing, as opposed to the two simple phonetic Japanese alphabets that he uses mostly at this point.

While wrapping presents this evening, I thought of a great response to when, inevitably, he'll hear from a classmate that Santa is not real, that it's really the parents. I'll affect an air of grave concern, then in a low voice confide that Santa brings toys only to kids that have been good, and so parents secretly get up early to check, and if Santa didn't bring a toy, they feel bad for their kid, [...]

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When Anthony wakes up, he gathers the friends he slept with, comes into the living room and deposits them somewhere random before starting his play for the day, or getting ready for school, etc. The photo above is from a week or so ago, though it's much the same every day save for the set of "and friends" that fluctuates often. (The pink pig, for example, is a recent addition.)

Realizing that he'll all-too-soon grow out of this childish cuteness, I took the snapshot last week to remember it by.

We received George at a baby shower thrown by my [...]

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NOTE: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size. Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 38 mm — 1/100 sec, f/5.6, ISO 6400 — full exif Homemade Oreo, Baby! Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm […]
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