After a busy January, we finally got out to do some skiing on February 11. This time, it was to Karuizawa for a day on the slopes of the small but charming Prince Hotel ski area, only five miles from the active volcano, Mt. Asama.



Sara stayed at home with Jii-chan all day, and Tomomi and I took turns skiing. She skied, while I watched Noah, and then we switched. Anri had a two hour lesson and later on, I took her up the chairlift to do some real runs with me. I basically held my poles horizontally in front of me, with Anri between my legs and holding the poles. Then I snowplowed all ... the ... way ... down ... the ... mountain. My legs hurt after doing that a few times! But Anri had a blast!

The lift tickets were given to us by a Christian pastor we know in the Karuizawa area. I had always thought this ski area was too small to be worth the lift ticket price. Having now been there, it reminded me of Ski Sundown in Connecticut, where I skied as a child. It was a surprisingly charming place with good snow conditions and better lodge food than I had ever tried. We'll go there again.

Early in the day, I went up the lift and snapped this photo (below) on the way down. It is of the view of Mt. Asama, an active volcano only five miles away from the ski area. This volcano erupted just a week prior to our visit. The cloud at the top is poisonous gas emitted by the volcano. Hiking to the top is against the law for obvious reasons. In the photo, you can also see the shinkansen station, between the ski slope and the volcano.



More photos coming soon!

We've been back in Japan for a little while now, and my kids have become great breakdancers! Check them out! Just click on the image below or here to see it!



Isn't that cool? Noah is especially great at balancing, what with that enormous head of his!

Well, we're back! We just spent two weeks in the US visiting family and had a great time! Lots of love and thanks to Grandma for having us over! Grandma finally got to see her new grandson Noah, and Anri and Sara had a blast at the pool, on a boat and in the mountains!



The trip out was long and tiring, but we finally arrived in Farmington and were able to see almost the whole family. Best of all, Anri and Sara got to play with their cousins. The house looked like a nursery school from day to day and it got noisy.

We also took a day trip or two. We went to Lackawaxen, PA to see the Zane Grey Museum.



We also went to Plymouth, MA to look at Mayflower II. Anri wanted the ship to sail out to see with her on it, but she had to wait until the next day, when we took the slow ferry to Nantucket. We spent a day on Nantucket, walking around town, looking at all the pretty houses and letting Tomomi take a look in all the little shops. Tomomi LOVED Nantucket. Very few Japanese know about this place.



In between, the kids went to the Feild Club a lot, and Anri had her first swimming lessons there. We all ate way more than we should have, but we are making up for that now that we are back in Japan.

We took a lot of photos, of course! I'll put up the link to these soon!

On Father's Day, I took the girls up to the mountains for a day of hiking and beautiful views. I didn't even realized it was Father's Day until much later on. Though we had gone hiking before, this was the first trip up Kamuriki, a peak that can be seen from just about anywhere in town.



Tomomi stayed home with Noah, and I took the girls in the car up the mountain to a small parking area on the side of the winding mountain road. From there, it was only about 30 minutes to the top with the first half walking on a gravel service road. The second half was a well-maintained trail. Steeper, but Anri ould handle it just fine. Sara rode in the pack on my back.

On the way up, Anri was a bit scared of bears, even though there weren't any, but I told her that if she sang somgs or talked while walking, the bears would not come near us. So she sang "do re mi" all the way to the top. At points along the way, we were rewarded with beautiful views of almost the entire range of the North Alps. At the top, we could see all of Chikuma, the town we live in, as well as the valley leading south to the city of Ueda. While at the top, we had some snacks and juice by the little Shinto shrine standing there.

We'll be going again, next time with Tomomi and Noah. The hike is easy and it would make a good spot for a family picnic. For photos, click here. This is our June 2008 photo album and photos from this day are toward the end.

Noah became one month old on the 17th, and on the 20th we took him to a Shinto Shrine for o-miya-mairi, a Japanese custom whenever there is an addition to the family.

The ritual done in the shrine is short, involving a Shinto priest pounding a drum and reciting a number of chants to alert the Shinto gods about presence of the new baby. While we have done this twice before with Anri and Sara, this was the first time with a baby boy, and Noah was wrapped in a child-size silk kimono for the occasion (girls in Japan get more lavish attention later on in their development). The kimono was a gift from Tomomi's parents, as is common with these things, and it is specifically designed and sized to drape the boy when he is an infant, while at the same time allow him to wear it when he is five for his Shichi-go-san.

Aside from this, the only other thing that happens when a baby reaches one month is the ordinary one-month check-up. Both Noah and Tomomi are fine.

As spring arrives, I have been very busy working on a number of things. Preparing for the new baby, revamping the website (again) and building things to make this rental house more of a home.


Tomomi is ready for baby #3 to get out. Her belly is huge and since her due date is March 31, the baby could be here any day now. We're all looking forward to it, though we're not sure how Sara will handle it yet. We'll see.

In the mean time, we have been getting ready for having 5 people here rather than four. We bought a collapsible crib so the baby can sleep downstairs when we are not up in the bedrooms, and I have been building a toy box for all of Anri's toys. This toy box is the start of my plan to make this home a little more livable for us. I got a plan online at FurniturePlans.com, downloaded it, bought the wood and tools necessary, and built the thing. It is actually a blanket chest, but works well as a toy box. And it is really big.



It took a long time to build, but it is finally done, and now only needs to be painted. The color will be a very white pink, like the color of our soon-to-blossom cherries. I plan to dilute the paint with water and apply it, allowing the wood grain to be visible through it.

But I don't plan on stopping there. The next project, time allowing, will be a bunk bed for the girls: Anri on top and Sara below. The plan is from the same source, and based on what I have seen it looks easier to make than the toy box.

And as if that were not enough, I have also done a little fine tuning to the website. Namely this weblog. Until recently, I had been manually coding my own entries, taking a lot of time to do so. I just finished adapting the site to work with Thingamablog, an open-source blog tool. Now, things are a lot easier to do. I still have to input a lot of the older entries, though. I will put these in a little bit at a time until they are all done.

In the mean time, we're just waiting for the baby. We'll keep everyone posted!

For the first time in 2 years, we spent Christmas in the US in 2007, taking the long journey to Farmington to Grandma's house and visiting family for 2 weeks.

Anri and Sara had a great time playing with Grandma, Grampie Bob and Duffy (although Duffy's antics occasionally freaked out Anri!) The kids also loved playing with their cousins. It was our first time seeing Nicholas and Matthew, and we were very happy to finally meet them. Anri had a blast with her cousin Emily. The two were inseparable during their time together and Anri's English ability was noticeably improving by the hour. Isaac was great to see too, and I sat there marvelling at just how much he looks like his Daddy. During our stay, we did a ton of shopping for supplies we can't readily get in Japan. We went to the States with two suitcases and returned just within the baggage limit with 6. Anri had her first experience skating and took a ski lesson for the first time. We all had a great time and now that we're back, we've been busy unpacking and getting back into our usual routine. We have over four-hundred photos from our trip, whcih can be viewed here.

Thanks and lots of love to Grandma for having us and to the Fishers for their wonderful dinner the night before we left!

In previous years, our tiny apartment limited the scope of any special event we wanted to hold. But now, with our new home and a lot more space, we were able to have our first large Thanksgiving Dinner, and welcomed friends and family in the area to join the party.

Japan has a labor-related national holiday around the same time, and this year, the holiday was on Friday, so we did our Thanksgiving a day late. Altogether, there were 14 of us, all crowded around short tables in the living room. The guests: Shizuko and Akira, who went to Maui the same time as we did last February, our friends Udo and Tomiko and their kids, Vera and Lukas, Tomomi's cousins Megumi and Kiyomi, Tomomi's aunt Katsuyo, and Megumi's husband, Hayato.

Tomomi cooked turkey, mashed potatoes, made a salad and baked apple pie and pumpkin pie, while the other guests all brought food and drink for all to share.

Once the kids were done with their food, they went upstairs to play, and when I went up to check on them, I found them sitting and watching Toy Story 2.



Everyone seemed to have a great time, and we look forward to doing this again in the future. We hope everyone back in the States had a great Thanksgiving too. Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Birthday, Sara!

It was one year ago today that Sara was born, and we celebrated her first birthday tonight with lots of food, ice cream cake and presents.

Baa-chan and Uncle Kenichi came over for dinner, a big meal with food prepared by Tomomi and her mother, and Anri and Sara had a great time playing with Uncle Kenichi. After dinner and the opening of presents -- all clothes for Sara, and one little pop-up book -- we finally brought out the Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake and sang Happy Birthday.

Sara couldn't quite blow out the lone candle on her own, but with a little help from her big sister Anri, it was out in no time.

Anri gave Sara a present too. Anri drew a picture of Sara, with very long hair and wrote Sara's name on it in English. Below Sara's name, Anri wrote "age 1" in Japanese. There's more writing on the top right side, but nobody is reall sure what that is!

Here is the drawing. To enlarge it, just click on the image.

Summer vacation has come and gone, and it was a hot one. The weather in parts of Japan reached the highest temperatures in 74 years. Nagano's heat was not record, but it was hot enough to make our move to a new home very tiring. It's just about done, now, so starting today, we will begin the monumental task of unpacking everything.


The new house is a rental, costing us about the same as the small apartment we were in. We have double the size now, plus plenty of storage and a yard for the girls to play in. Moving was a task, and we owe lots of thanks to Paul and Leon Hale, who drove up from Nagaoka for a day to help with the large firniture items. And thanks to Tomomi's brother, Tadahiko, cousin Megumi and her husband Hayato who helped with the last minute items. The heat was tough at times, and I went through bottles of iced tea every day (barley tea, non-sugar). The only thing left to do now is disconnect the internet connection here and take the computer over to the new house.

In the middle of the move, we took a day off to go to the Gunma Safari Park and let Anri see some animals. Located in the next prefecture from Nagano, the Safari Park is the drive through type, and Anri had a blast seeing zebras and giraffes walking right past her window. Later on, we got a photo taken with a lion cub. Look in the photo below. That is a real lion I am holding. Anri was a big scared it would eat her.

After seven years in this apartment, we have finally had enough. So we are moving, beginning next week, across town into a house.

Our new home, though only a rental, is where we're going to be until we can get through the red tape around the land we own, An average sized house by Japanese standards, it has plenty of room, including storage space, and best of all, a yard for Anri and Sara to play in. Another good thing is storage space. There are walk-in closets in the bedrooms and storage cases outside; much more than we have now.

The apartment served us well for a time, but after Anri was born and the toys started piling up, we realized the place was getting smaller and smaller. Having had enough, Tomomi was online looking at Yahoo Japan's real estate pages when she came across a single listing for a rental house in the town we live in. There are thousands of apartments available, but a free standing home? Just this one. We jumped at the chance and went to see it the next day.J

apan is an odd country concerning real estate. There is some sort of thinking here that you should never buy a house that has already been lived in. As a result of this mindset, nobody sells their home, nor are there ever any buyers interested in buying one. So, once you build a house, the value of that house only goes down. After twenty years, your house is worth nothing, and the land it is on is worth whatever the market value is. Sales below market value almost never happen, and the only way to get lucky and sell your land at a much higher price is if the local rail line suddenly decides to put a new station in the neighborhood.

At this point, we have already started preparing for the move. Boxes of books, music, DVDs and other stuff is already stacked in nearly every room, and we are finally going to get the key to the house on Friday -- a chance to clear some things out of here. As we make some progress, I will snap a few photos.

It's been a long time since I actually made an entry. Sorry about that. With my new kindergarten classes that started up again in May, I have had little time to update everyone with news and photos. But, at long last, I have a free moment, and here's what went on with us during Golden Week.

Golden Week, the week from April 29 to May 5, is a popular time for Japanese people to get away from work and enjoy themselves for a little while. While many choose to take trips overseas, we stayed in country, enjoying the mild weather of Nagano and taking a trip to Yokohama for some shopping. The first day of Golden Week, Tomomi had a hula lesson, so Anri, Sara and I hiked up a nearby mountain with Tomomi's cousin Megumi and her husband Hayato, to the ancient Mori Shogunzuka tomb. Sara was in the baby carrier and Anri hiked up all by herself! We had a small picnic on the grassy lawn there before heading down.

The next day, we took a trip to a local zoo to let Anri see the kangaroos there. After a picnic by the river, Anri saw the three kangaroos at the small, old zoo in Suzaka, just north of Nagano City. The roos were sleeping, of course. It was the middle of the afternoon. So we went to a nearby park with a pond where I took Anri on a rowboat for half an hour. Anri insisted on rowing the oars with me, so we made a little game out of it. She can row, but only if we sing "Row Row Row Your Boat" as we do it. And, Anri could not stand up in the boat. That was most important, of course. Tomomi watched from shore, taking video as we passed by.

On the 1st, we got in the car and drove to Yokohama, the more fun and much more popular neighboring city of Tokyo. The drive down to the Tokyo/Yokohama area went without incident, except for the last stretch into Yokohama itself, where we missed an exit and ended up taking a circuitous route to the Yamashita Park area. Sara cried when she was hungry, but otherwise slept the whole way. Anri was quite entertaining, asking us every few miles, "Is this Yokohama?" Hearing this question every minute or so was pretty funny, in restrospect, but I told Anri, "If you see any mountains, then we aren't there yet."

We arrived at the New Grand Hotel at around 3pm. After checking in, I took a restless Anri around the old lobby and parlors of this historic hotel. MacArther once stayed here, I read somewhere, and the old wing of the hotel is charming in a style you never see anymore -- certainly not in Japan, anyway.

Anri was running around uncontrollably in the parlors and it only got worse later on when we went to Motomachi, the big shopping area here. As we went from store to store, Anri was not at all content to stay nearby. Just as she is always off visiting other classes at kindergarten, Anri repeatedly broke loose from our hands and took off around the store, picking up and playing with things as she went. Going from store to store in Motomachi, Anri seemed to think that we were not in Yokohama, and kept asking, "Daddy, are we going to Yokohama?""

Anri, we are IN Yokohama. This IS Yokohama." Five minutes later, "Daddy, are we going to Yokohama?" Sigh.

Anri's Antics amused the store clerks, especially the ones in Baby Gap, where Anri was playing shopper with fervor. The whole time she was taking items off racks, holding them up against her body and asking, "Look at this. This is pretty, isn't it?"

After a tantrum thrown in the Motomachi Starbuck's, we knew that dinner at a restaurant later on would be a bad idea, so we headed back to the hotel, dropping by a convenience store along the way. It was here that Anri decided to run laps around the store while Tomomi chased her. On return to the hotel, we were thoroughly wiped out, but we got a new Kitamura wallet for Tomomi, and the evening view from our room was beautiful.

The next day we woke early and got out by 9am. The weather was nice, so we got a cup of coffee in Yamashita Park,, a harborside park across the street from our hotel. Anri saw the boats in the harbor, one being an old luxury liner. We then took the Sea Bass boat, a kind of touristy water bus, to the old red brick warehouses -- in the Minato Mirai area -- now serving as a shopping center. On the way, we passed by a pair of Japan Coast Guard ships, something I had never seen before. From the dock, we walked to our first destination: the big ferris wheel in Minato Marai. The largest ferris wheel in the world, we figured this was Anri's treat for the day. Tomomi was scared. Anri was thrilled. Sara was sleeping the whole time.

Every year at this time, the trees blossom and everyone goes out to have a party under them. It is known as O-hanami, or "blossom viewing". We went to two places this year, the grounds of Ueda Castle and to our own property for a large picnic under our six cherry trees.



Ueda Castle was crowded but beautiful, and Anri liked walking around among the pretty flowers. But the big event was a few days later, today, when we had a big picnic lunch under our own cherry blossoms.

The Hale family from Nagaoka just visited for a couple of days, and we all had a great time dining, shopping and enjoying each other's company!



Although Sara slept most of the time, Anri had a great time playing with Emily during the Hales' stay. We look forward to seeing them again in the Spring.

Right on cue, Anri says, "THREE!" when asked how old she is. Her third birthday was today, and just like on Christmas, she was in heaven over all the presents she got!



Anri had a great birthday cake, brought over from the local bakery by Jii-chan. Among other presents, she got a Candy Land game, a Barbie doll and a big box of wooden blocks to play with. It was the second very happy day in a week for Anri!



The Candy Land game was especially great. She insisted on playing it no fewer than 8 times on her birthday alone!

Sara Marie Grey is here at last! At 1:03 AM Japan Time, she came into the world weighing 3,306 grams (7 pounds, 4.6 ounces) and measuring 51 cm from head to toe. Both Mother and Baby are doing fine.



On Tuesday the 14th, at around ten in the morning, Tomomi knew something was different. She was feeling discomfort every ten to twenty minutes -- a pain that suggested the onset of labor. It wasn't until late in the afternoon, after seeing whether or not the pain would come at more regular intervals, that we all decided it was time to go to the maternity clinic.

The clinic was busy. A lot of babies were being born at the time, and we quickly learned that the rooms were nearly full. Tomomi was brought to one of the labor rooms, where she and I stayed for about 4 hours. According to Tomomi, the labor was nowhere near as tough as it was when Anri was born (24 hours of little progression, followed by a shot of pitocin). But, when we were finally taken into the delivery room and the pushing began, that is where it got difficult. When Anri was born, the actual pushing was not so bad, Tomomi said. This time around, it was the opposite. Short labor, really difficult push.

She did so well, and the feeling of joy we both felt at first sight of our baby girl was overwhelming! We both remarked, almost in unison, how much Sara looks like Anri did when she was born. The doctor was quick to get out the digital camera after the birth and snapped a handful of shots for us. The time of birth was 1:03 AM, November 15, 2006.

By 3 AM, Tomomi had been taken to her room, where she would spend the next five days with Sara. A private room with a bathroom and shower, Tomomi was happy to finally get some rest after a tough day. After getting Tomomi and Sara settled in and all of their things put in order, I finally headed back home, getting to bed at four in the morning.

For pictures of Sara, please click here.