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 [...]

View full post »

Fumie's mom took Anthony on a helicopter ride yesterday, the five-minute flight time "Bay Area Course" offered by Ogawa Air (小川航空) in Osaka.

Here are some pics from her cell-phone camera...

Harnessed Up Parking Lot Ready to Go! Post-Flight Photo-Op

The flight was only five minutes, but that's more than I've ever done. In fact, prior to yesterday, I'd known only one person who had ever been in a helicopter (20+ years ago, in the military, where he spent the flight throwing up, or, at least, wanting to).

As for me, I'd love to do it sometime but it's ridiculously [...]

View full post »

My folks gave the "Tractor Treader" thing you see above to Anthony about four years ago, on his 2nd birthday. He wasn't quite ready for it at the time, nor, frankly, was I because lacking any kind of pump, it took 30 minutes of huffing and puffing and getting dizzy to blow it up....

Anthony was scared to climb in and roll around in it, but he didn't mind climbing through it to get onto me...

(These last two are from my old family picture site that I no longer update because I now put so many pictures up on [...]

View full post »

The weather has been really nice lately, and with my cold improving enough to move around, I thought it'd do me good to get out and enjoy the fresh air. Fumie had been watching Anthony most of the day, so I took the opportunity to take him with me to the park, him to ride his bike and me to take a nap on a bench.

I didn't bring my camera (that whole "being sick" thing has its downsides), but was able to dip into my archives for photos to illustrate today's post.

The bench I snoozed on is the [...]

View full post »

Today's post is an essentially-random collection of pictures.

A view of Mt. Fuji, taken with my point-n-shoot from the window of a shinkansen (bullet train) traveling at about 250kph. This was from a trip about a year ago to Tokyo to see Kousuke Atari in concert.

A point of trivia: I believe the river you can see in the background is an electrical dividing line: household current to the east of the river (Tokyo, Nagano, Sapporo...) is 50Hz, while that to the west (Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Amami....) is 60Hz. The difference matters less with modern equipment, but old clocks [...]

View full post »