Happy New Year!

I visited America over the winter holidays. My dad is doing much better. His speech is becoming clearer and he can walk a little. He is receiving wonderful care and has speech and physical therapy five days a week.

The nursing home is only five minutes from my parent's house, so I walked there everyday. We made dinner a couple of times and brought it to the home. We also took dad to a nearby restaurant and went out on walks. My dad is working hard. He has a long road ahead of him to learn basic life skills, however, I'm very optimistic!

In other good news, my beautiful niece, Ida Maria Gensler was born on December 17th. She is named after both of her maternal great grandmothers. I visited her and my energetic nephew, Jonah in New York City. I was very happy and content to have this precious little girl sleeping in my arms.

Below: Kirsten AKA mom and Ida

Below: Jonah playing with a shinkansen. Jonah is very active, so most of my pictures of him are blurry. It was tons of fun to play with him. I forgot how fun it was to play hide and seek!

Below is Andy, Marc and Jonah all bundled up for the freezing cold of NYC.

I knit Ida a sweater. I can't believe it fits her. It looked way too small when I was working on it.










I had a lot of strange moments in the US. There were many things I forgot about in America. Most of it was minor, such as taxi doors not automatically closing, large food portions, being able to understand everything happening around me, and remembering to tip. Overall, it was great to see my family and friends. I saw many movies, ate lots of great food and enjoyed being in America. My only regret was that we didn't have time to go to Phoenix.

I kept forgetting my camera. I wish I had a picture of the jumbo slice of pizza we had one night. It was probably the same size as an entire regular pizza in Japan. Below: My mom with a huge salad; Julian, Dan and Naomi

It's good to be back in Japan. We are down to our last 8 months! Happy New Year!