Megumi Jo Boutwell

Megumi was born July 15th, 2008. Makoto is officially a big brother now.
The morning started at 6AM with Makoto asking, “Mama doko?” “At the hospital,” I replied sleepily. Makoto said, “Hosptl iku.” “After we eat and have a shower” was the final word repeated many times to the final command [...]

Yumi checked into the hospital earlier today for the c-section tomorrow. Leaving the hospital room was pretty easy. All we had to do was to tell Makoto, “Drive! Car!” However, in the parking lot, Makoto realized mommy wasn’t with us. “Mama wa?” “Mama doko?”
We managed to get home with a [...]

This morning we awoke to Makoto prodding Yumi with an:
あけて！あけて！Akete! Akete!
We were puzzled what he meant. 開けて！ of course means ‘open (up)!,’ but open what? The door?
しばらくしたら・・・ After a little while…
After a little while, Yumi realized Makoto meant:
おきて！おきて！ Okite! Okite! (Get up; wake up!)
This made more sense.
This reminded me of going to summer [...]

Chapter seven is up on TJP!
Of course you can read many, many more chapters at Rich’s website, but we are adding each chapter (slowly but surely) to TJP with sound and PDFs.

念のため
nen no tame
Just in case

On the last train we rode yesterday—the last leg of the journey—Makoto, still full of energy, played for almost an hour with his cars.
He had lined up five of his cars, vans, and trucks when Yumi nudged me and showed me what he was doing.  Makoto is very neat and likes [...]

We have been waiting a few months (funabin/sea mail takes a long time!) for a new beginners textbook to arrive. 50 Keys to Opening the New World of Japanese was highly recommended by a very good customer a few months back. After talking with the author we decided to stock the textbook. [...]

There is nothing more uniting for Americans of all persuasions than the universal hatred of April 15th, Tax Day. There are no Democrats or Republicans on April 15th—just one gaggle of sleep-deprived, grumpy folks waiting in line at the post office.
I don’t know why I’m complaining; it only takes 60,000 pages to explain the [...]

Yesterday we noticed a little rumbling in the sky. I kept saying ‘thunder’ to Makoto and he quickly matched the sound of the word with the sound in the sky. Yumi did the same with かみなり kaminari.
We didn’t think much of it until suddenly the wind and rain really picked up. Looking [...]

Two quick 親ばか notes:
1) 待って！
Just now Yumi was chasing Makoto trying to put his diaper on. Makoto doesn’t like this part too much so he runs from mommy. As Yumi approached, I heard him take off saying, 「待って！」 matte Wait! Obviously he doesn’t quite get the meaning of that one yet.
Makoto just [...]

I’ve spent all morning trying out different MySQL database commands to restore a .sql file (database backup file) on a server through SSH.  Just as I was about to give up I got the right sequence of letters and numbers to appease the angry monster.
(this is more for my future benefit than anything else)
mysql -u [...]