I think it would be a slight understatement to say that it’s been a while.

Life has been flying by, and finding a moment to breathe, much less keep in touch, has been difficult at best.

For starters, my daughter, Julie, was born on September 19th. She’s almost a month old, and poor Kaori hasn’t had much time to sleep. I try to help take care of her, but we also have Ryu to watch, and he’s almost 2 now, so he’s demanding a lot more attention than he did before.

But the kids are good. Ryu is full of energy, and usually very happy. He’s been a wonderful big brother, and really tries to calm Julie when she starts crying. Julie… well, what can I say? She’s a newborn baby. She cries and does all the things that newborn babies do. She does seem pretty curious though.

Beyond that, work has been interesting. I really don’t know how else to say it. I’ve been given the opportunity to create a couple curricula as part of our programs. I honestly have no idea how good or bad they are, but I’m doing my best. The first one is targeting 5 year-olds, and focuses on using a combination of demonstration based learning with active learning (TPR if you’re familiar with it). The goal is to make learning programming more accessible to kindergarten students. The biggest difficulty is that most of our market is going to be doing this in Japanese, so there are definitely language barriers that we have to overcome. The second program is for students who are entering 5th or 6th grade, and is more project based, using programming as part of a bigger project where they also get to learn other skills, like film editing, or story planning.

One of the things that I haven’t been able to find much time for, much to my own disdain, is writing. That has to change, as I have a feeling that all the writing I used to do helped with my own mental health, and while I’m not going crazy or anything, stress has taken quite a toll on me over the course of the last few months.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I’m going to make it a point to start posting more often, so if anyone actually still reads this and wants to give me motivation, then bug me to write!