七五三Photo of my kids

I haven't posted any kids pictures for a while, so here's a formal one we took this month for Mei's 3 year old rite of passage celebration called Shichi-Go-San (seven five three) in Japan.

For the record, because kids grow up before you know it...

Michael is seven now, a first grader at Mitaka 2nd Primary School. He loves soccer, baseball, all types of games, and anything he can "win" in. He plays soccer for a local team called the Kickers and watches videos of his own games over and over. He's quick with math and a good reader and writer in both English and Japanese. In English, he's currently reading The Kid Who Only Hit Homers and book No.22 of The Magic Treehouse Series at a rate of about a chapter per day. He's also into kanji (Chinese characters) and loves to write difficult kanji. He gets excited by seeing kanji like these.

Mei, three, currently goes to BKI, an English language pre-school near Musashi-Sakai. Very nice school. She loves princesses, animals and dancing and being silly with her brother. They get in noisy fights, but they mostly take care of each other very well. This March, I was getting a little worried about her English ability, but after she started going to BKI, she's become very talkative in both languages. She's a very social, outgoing caring type and is always trying to take care of me like a mother or doctor or something, bringing me food, drink, medicine, clothes etc. It can get annoying when she carries it too far, but is adorable. She's doing well with her phonics and is getting ready to start simple books. She's a good singer and dancer, so we hope to get her enrolled in something musical soon.

More than anything, I'm very happy they are both healthy. It's challenging but fun to be helping them grow up and learn to think about things and be considerate to others. For example, we had a little episode the other day. Michael got mad with me during a game and expressed his anger physically by kicking me, which was a shock to me because it had not happened for a long time since he was very little. So...we had to go through a process of helping him learn to solve problems and express feelings with words, not violence...he had to forfeit his TV and computer game privileges for a while and write "I will talk about my problems and not hurt people." 50 times in his notebook. He apologized and he has been on very good behavior for the week since then.

For Christmas, he wants Wii. Not sure if Santa is going to deliver that.
Mei wants a big pink teddy bear. Probably no problem.