Samurai Momma (formerly Mom in Two Cultures)

On the evening of the first day of e-learning for the kids, Stow spilled a huge cup of Sprite on Sky's computer and notebooks. Sky had ...

The first year of our marriage, we fought about vacuuming. Ren would often come home from work around midnight and jump straight into h...

We have been married for almost fourteen years, and for nearly all of those years, not to mention all the years before we got married, Ren h...

Last year for  Valentine's Day, I recounted the story of how Ren and I met and ended up getting married. You  can read  that story here ...

Twelve years into our marriage and fifteen years after our first date, Ren and I discovered our first and only shared cultural touchstone: C...

Okay, I guess to talk about what happened next, I need to backtrack a bit... During my two weeks in the hospital, in an attempt to get rid o...

So here are a few tips from the Ren playbook of luuu~v. 1. Obtain unwitting foreign girl's phone number before she leaves the hospital b...

On my third day in the hospital, I was finally allowed to join others in the common area and eat my first meal of solid food. And by solid f...

In honor of Valentine's Day, a little story... When I moved off to Japan to teach English the summer after college graduation, friends j...

I've always been a bit enamored by the idea that writing a wish and hanging it at a shrine might just be enough to make it come true. (T...

This blog post is part two in my description of some of the headaches that come when you try to live a multicultural, international life som...

So you know from the tag line at the top of my blog that I’m mom to three smallish kids (ages 7, 4, and 1>) and stepmom to one big one, a...

This is the conversation we had at dinner last night: Ren: (in Japanese and then self-translated into English) This has baby bamboo in it. (...

10. You can't sew. Therefore, you can't make all of the fancy-schmancy things for school like the lunch box bag, the tea cup bag, th...

One question I used to get asked when I visited Japanese elementary schools was: "Do Americans sleep with their shoes on?" What an...

A few months after Ren and I started dating, I got called into an unexpected meeting with the head English teacher, Mori-sensei. At that poi...

There are two exceedingly important roles in the family that seem to be assigned to every Japanese housewife. The first is manager of family...