I recently asked my parents to dig out my birth certificate because I need it to get Rikuto his own British birth certificate. When my mum emailed me to say she found it, I started to reply…”Thanks mum! There aren’t any surprises, are there? I’m not adopted from a small African nation, am I?”
I thought it was funny when I wrote it, but the smile was wiped off my face when I searched for a particular country to put into my joke. Within seconds of my search on Google, I found this:
I can understand “Urgent Need!”, but “Reduced Fee!”? Sounds like they’re selling a product, not a person. So how much do these reduced “items” go for? About $22,000 apparently.
I’m out of my depth on discussions of adoption, and I can’t comment on the reasons for putting a price tag on a child’s head. What I object to is the wording in these “advertisements”. I know there are families out there who don’t have a lot of money yet are keen to adopt, and more power to them, but the language used here just doesn’t feel right at all. 
I love your dolch word website. I use the phrase activities all the time. It has helped with improving fluency and accuracy in a fun way. My students grades 1-5 enjoy the dice game and the rock-paper-scissors. We use all the activities and I have passed it on to other teachers. Thanks so much. 
Rikuto is still less than two months old, but since he wouldn’t sleep and had joined me at the computer – well, in a basket on the floor next to me – I thought I’d find a bedtime story to read to him. A quick Google search for “Children’s Bedtime Stories” brought up Gordon Dioxide’s collection of 
If there is an American equivalent of Japanese cram school, then it would be 
It seems kancho-ing someone in public is not as acceptable as perhaps it used to be, so they’ve made a video arcade game called Boong-Ga Boong-Ga so people can kancho all they like. I don’t know about you, but I’m worried my kindergarten kids will start training on this thing, and as one commenter said on 