Rhianna, Shinachan and John's Blog: January 2008

After a long delay, I'm back to good health and ready to update the blog. We've had a very busy past month, but I'll try to fill in the highlights as much as possible. We went to my home in Colorado on the 22nd of December, but for the preceding week, I was terribly sick with a cold. Unfortunately, both Shinako and Rhianna caught my terrible cold just in time for the flight back. Luckily, Rhianna had no problems on the flight. She's a very good little girl, sleeps well, and rarely cries, but we didnt know what to expect for a round-trip of two long flights from Tokyo to Seattle, and then Seattle to Denver. As always, though, Rhianna was just fine. In fact, she was her usual Miss Popularity self, and the stewardesses on the flight even asked to carry her around the plane.

We arrived in Colorado completely exhausted and sick, but it was a wonderful reunion with my parents. We spent the first week of our trip to Colorado basically reccuperating, recovering from jet-lag, and watching various reality television show marathons on tv. Unfortunately, not long after we began our trip, my parents both caught the cold, so the entire family was sick for a period of time. Luckily, however, during the second week of our trip everyone started to come back to normal, and we were able to go out for a bit of shopping and go to a few restaurants. My good friend, Eric Richards, and his wife, Erica, and son, Carson, also came over for a fun visit. It was really neat watching Carson and Rhianna interact. Carson is about 2 months older than Rhianna, and really crawling well. Im sure he'll be walking soon!!! You may notice Carson and Rhianna wearing the same clothes in a few pictures--those just happen to be from Shinako's online store, Baby Purple, and their pictures can be seen again at this link: ( http://item.rakuten.co.jp/babypurple/c/0000000101/).
By the way, Shinako's store, which opened last month, is doing very well!

This week, my good friend, Jason Latorre, is visiting from Vietnam. Jason is a diplomat with the Canadian Foreign Service who I met and became friends with when I lived in Yamagata. Jason and I travelled together on separate trips to both Vietnam and Cambodia in the late 90's, and share an interest in the languages, cultures, and histories of Asian countries, not to mention an interest in making trouble. Jason is here for a meeting at the Canadian embassy in Tokyo, and we all spent a pleasant evening out on Saturday. Jason and I also spent the evening out with his friends from the Canadian embassy in Tokyo on Tuesday night.

One piece of big news from me is that I resigned from Johnson & Johnson, and will be starting work with a new company in February. I'll let you know which company that is in a later blog...

Rhianna is just about to really crawl, and has been rolling from side to side all across the room recently. She has just started to figure out going foward very slowly. I think in the next few days, it will become a full crawl. Time to baby-proof the apartment!

I'll post several pictures and videos from the past month.

More soon!!!

Flight Video Pt. 1

Flight Video Pt. 2

Arrival at Denver Airport