Life is never dull when your children attend local school in a foreign country. My kids have been in Japanese school for two years, but things still catch me by surprise. My daily thrill, if you can call it that, is reviewing the stacks of purinto (handouts) from the school. I never know quite what I'm going to find.

Take the other day, when my fifth-grader came home and presented his handouts with a flourish. "You're gonna love this one," he said, grinning as he pulled a piece of paper out of the pile. "It's a real doozy."

Now that my kids understand, more or less, what's going on at school, I make them sit down with me when I go over the handouts. I read Japanese, more or less, but the kanji I don't know always seem to be the critical ones for comprehension. Sometimes my kids can explain things to me. More or less.