On Sunday we made a short visit to our next-door neighbors, a pleasant retired couple with grandkids ranging from a bit older than Anthony to adult. Fumie and Anthony had plans, so we intended to stop in just to say "hi" and show off Anthony, whom they hadn't seen in two years.

We stayed for about 15 minutes, and left as Anthony started to get a bit fussy.

Five minutes later, as Fumie got Anthony situated in the car for them to go out, we realized why he was getting so fussy: his entire face was breaking out [...]

Can anyone recommend a good preschool near Cupertino, CA (ZIP: 95014) that's open now and has availability through to the end of next month? The phone book is full of them, so we've started checking around, but by the time we get through them the summer will be over.

Besides the basics of clean, safe, caring, blah blah blah, it's important to us that the environment be predominantly Amerian English, since Anthony's English development is one of the reasons we're here. If most of the teachers and kids have thick accents with improper grammar, it wouldn't be the [...]
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Finally getting around to processing some of the accumulated few-thousand photos I've taken but not yet dealt with, here are some from a park Anthony and I visited in May.

(That last picture has an exposure of only 1/5th of a second -- he was really cranking!)

I'd like to expand Anthony's exposure to English, and one way to do that is with a broader range of videos or movies. We've been pretty restrictive about watching anything on TV/video, and until now he's been limited to the occasional Dora the Explorer, Bob the Builder, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and the Disney movies Dinosaur and Finding Nemo. By far, Dora is his favorite.

Looking for different types of videos, I went to my old DVD collection and found a few to try: 101 Dalmatians, Ice Age, and Space Jam.

We started out with [...]
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Anthony's hair can get wild, but it doesn't grow very fast. He was over a year old by the time he had his first haircut. Here's a screen capture from the video:

More than two and a half years later, he's had only a few more haircuts, twice in the place down the street where Fumie and I often get our hair cut, but mostly by me. Yesterday, we went to a kids-only haircut shop with racecars for chairs and videos of trains and such in front of each station.

It was a very smooth experience (unlike any [...]