Samurai and Baby Books

My mom just spent the last week in Japan visiting Elizabeth & Dan so we went over there today to visit & see the pictures. She had a great time tooling around the country and seeing the temples & geisha w/ Dan's mom. She brought back some goofy erasers for the kids that look like Japanese food (including a Saki bottle w/ 4 glasses) w/ hilarious English warnings on the packages; phrases like "Eraser is not food. There is fear of suffocation." Another warning is "Please don't put eraser w/ others for a long time because eraser stick to others." Those are quality warning labels. Apparently, accuracy w/ the language is never really a concern & the Japanese love to laugh @ how we write Japanese stuff here. I wonder how many people are walking around w/ tattoos that don't mean what they think they mean. I don't mean that in the post-modern, meaning is constantly being reconstructed & shifted through free-play sense, I mean that all these Japanese phrases we're always seeing are just wrong... Jason, don't you have a Japanese tattoo? Have any native speakers of Japanese ever seen it? I kind of hope it's accurate, but then again, I'd never really know anyway, which is their point w/ the warning labels too. She also got Aiden this hilarious Samurai head band. He hasn't taken it off yet.Along w/ the gifts & pictures, I also got to take a look through my Baby Book (& then through Elizabeth's & Jean's). I was going to bring them home to ensure the accuracy of the following quotes, but my mom wouldn't let me because she was afraid I'd use them to make fun of my siblings on-line. Well, now I'm just going to make fun of them w/o the ability to fact-check. It's funny how the personality traits that were developing @ 9 months old are still so prevalent. Here are some of the best quotes:
Me
* Andre seems to be developing a fondness for Davy Crockett (4 yrs old)
* John B & Paul V gave Andre Star Wars figures for his b-day (5 yrs old)
* Andre's reading skills are progressing slowly, but his handwriting is still rather sloppy (7 yrs old... or possibly yesterday)
* Andre is doing so well in school; his favorite subjects are English & math (8 yrs old... kind of ironic that she was never able to say such a thing about me after that)
* Andre is playing soccer & Gary is actually coaching! (5 yrs old)
* Andre loves to plan things; even a trip to A&W is closely planned out & he decides what he's going to get. He gets rather upset if they are out of what he wants... we're working on that (5 yrs old)
* An interest in Star Wars seems to have replaced his interest in Matchbox Cars (6 yrs old... I suppose this sentiment could be said for my entire generation which explains the waning in popularity of Matchbox/Hot Wheels & the rise of the action figure market)
* Andre is quickly become quite the little soccer star (8 yrs old)
Jean
* Jean loves to stare (1 yr old)
* When he is proud of himself, Jean says "Yay!" and claps his hands (recently, I think)
* Jean burned his hand on the wood burning stove (2 yrs old... I remember Elizabeth doing this, but not Jean)
Elizabeth
* Elizabeth has a lot of "cranky time" (1 yr old)
* We went to Epcot Center this year instead of Disney World. We all loved it, but Elizabeth kept asking when we were going back to "the old part" (4 yrs old)
* Elizabeth is refusing baby food but she only has 1 tooth so she just gums everything (1 yr old... I think this goes hand in hand w/ "cranky time")