Picked up two options for 2nd grade summer reading from the 100 yen shelf at book off 😂 My son's IEP has him doing the same work as other kids but with extra teacher/parent support. So he's going to be reading one page and following along with me reading ~10 pages every day to finish in time.

Hallelujah, this time my younger son also allowed them to clean his teeth for the first time ever. Suuuch a relief! It was ROUGH before.

Today a bunch of people from some city-sponsored anti-drug coalition were outside the grocery store handing out pamphlets about the harmful effects of drugs, along with these promotional presents... a packet of basil seeds. The only acceptable herb???

Walking to school in a double-typhoon. ☔

My kids have a new kinda weird favorite snack... 'cucumber lightsaber.' 😂

Kazuma normally has a really hard time focusing on homework. Almost every day his homework is just tracing kanji, but today's homework was copying sentences from the workbook into the notebook, and for whatever reason he LOVED this assignment so he did two days' worth of homework all on his own!

Our preschool is the best. They have a dedicated 'play in the mud' day where they intentionally floor the sanbox and surrounding ara and let the kids go ham. Afterwards kids get hosed off and change into spare clothes.

Being a homeowner means paying 700 dollars to have 50+ years worth of grease buildup power-washed out of the drainage pipes of a house you've only lived in for 7. Being a millennial means putting this off for months because you have no idea who to call about the swamp forming in the backyard. 😂🤮💰

Dinosaur Museum

I told my 5yo to take a picture of me with the dinosaur in an attempt to convince him it's not scary so I could then take his picture. I did not know the dinosaur moves and makes noise! He captured my 100% authentic reaction fleeing for my life. 😂😂😂

Camping in Fukui. This campground has very friendly goats!

Another word I hate translating is つむじ / 旋毛. We don't really talk about 'the whorls of (a person's) hair' in English prose. Unless its specifically describing the movement of hair, I usually change it to 'the crown (of the head),' which is still awkward but a little less?

This kid has been doing a variation of 不登校 where he doesn't actually mind going to school, he just completely refuses to walk. No actual reason, he's just lazy and going by car is easier. 😭🙄😖

Random thoughts while cleaning the bath/shower room: "Scrubbing Bubbles" is the most Japanese-coded American product name ever. It can be translated so literally as ゴシゴシあわあわ and lose absolutely nothing in nuance... and yet they left it as Scrubbing Bubbles in English on the packaging here. 😅

Night at the Manga Museum was AMAZING! My favorite was the 3am tour of the employees-only climate-controlled book vault in the basement where they are preserving over 250,000 volumes of antique manga magazines and books dating back to the 1960s!

Got our first property tax bill since buying our house in 2024, and at 36,700 yen (230 dollars) for the entire YEAR, it's less than the automobile tax for a regular-engine car, and less than half of ONE MONTH's property tax for a very modest house in my home town. This is why I live in Japan 👍

I just got a new novel series to work on (yay!) and the writing is possibly the best I've worked on so far (yay!) but the character names are SO BAD! I think the author set her keyboard to katakana mode and then had a seizure 😱 It's just random katakana smushed together 😂😂😂

Kids' first movie theater experience: Super Mario Galaxy. Listening comprehension is my weakest skill so I have to admit I only understood about 90% of the movie, but it was good 😅 Kids were surprisingly well behaved too!

Yesterday we went for a walk to another shrine in our neighborhood, I think this is number four in a 10 min radius of the house.

It's really annoying to be in between projects with all the different companies I freelance for at the same time, but knowing that if I register with another company suddenly they'll all send me work at the same time and I'll have to turn something down. 🙄

Today's my 10 year wedding anniversary ＆ 12 year anniversary of moving to Shiga (I've spent 13 years in Japan including 1 year study abroad in Nagoya, but I went back for a year in between to finish my degree). To celebrate I recreated the 'strawberry vanilla custard tart' currently @ starbucks.

Out of 739 applicants, 20 were chosen by raffle to participate in a special "Night at the Manga Museum" event to celebrate Kyoto Manga Museum's 25th anniversary. Incredibly, I won one of those 20 spots! I'm abandoning my kids (with their father) to go to a giant sleepover in a manga museum!!! 😍😍😍

A happy weekend with good weather. They're closing a Starbucks location that we have a long history with because it was the first and one of very few in our area up until recently. So me and some of my child-free friends I rarely get to see anymore got together for a coffee date 😍

Welcome to second grade kanji 😍 They are wobbly cute elementary schooler letters, but I'm so proud of him. At age 4 I thought he'd be non-verbal for life. When he entered 1st grade in special ed I worried he'd never learn to read. But he's absolutely thriving 🥰

I bought two cheap old DS's from メルカリ for my kids to play with on the plane ride to America this summer because they're obsessed with Mario 😅 They are enjoying 'practicing how to use it.'

Mr. T helped me make cinnamon buns the other day. I forgot to get a picture of them after baking but of course we slathered them in an ungodly amount of cream cheese frosting.

I'm now up to four different militaristic groups in the novel series I'm currently translating. 1.護衛 (MC's bodyguards) 2.軍 (the national military) 3.私兵団 (territory's private army) 4.自警団 (city militia). Any more and I'm not going to be able to keep them straight!

We visited the US consulate in Osaka today to renew this cutie's US passport because he's turning 5 soon! 🇺🇸

Every year me and my equally non-Christian friends gather at my house on the appropriate day and have a taco party to celebrate easter eggs, because we're millenial Americans 😅👍