Kids, the real anarchists

Raising kids can be a real challenge. In this day and age I sometimes wonder how and why any of us chooses to have kids at all. Everyone has an opinion on what you should or should not be doing. I`m going to be writing about the challeges in my family and how we get around the obstacles that face us.

My family is Mommy, Daddy, girl 6, boy 3.5. You`ll be getting to know them better in subsequent posts. Today a little about me. I`m 36. My name is Jessica and I live in Japan. I`m from the U.S.  I`m an english as a foreign language teacher and I run my own school with my husband. www.jessica-yamaguchi-mie.com

I`ve been here for 11 years now. It is a very sore point with my parents. They are very unhappy about my choice to live here. I am an only child. I am one of two north american women married to a Japanese man in my prefecture(county). There may be one or two more that I am not aware of. I love snowboarding and go almost every weekend during the season. I drive 6 hours to the slopes and sleep in the mini van with my family. We all have a good time. We make sure to bring lots of DVD`s for the kids but we get pretty exhausted playing to stay up too late. I believe tha my family should spend a lot of time together doing things we think are fun.

I work really hard to teach my kids English. In fact I work really hard to teach my daughter anything. She can be really stubborn about doing certain things and takes a lot of cajoling. Some people say she is just like her mother.

I think about the future a lot. Where my family will be in 10 years. W