My little Japanese niece Rina, the latest addition to our family.

I love how little children smell clean, they have no toxin yet in their system also they smell like soap. Babies are soft. Anyone looking at them can see the tender, fragile skin and know it for the rose-leaf softness that invites a finger’s touch. But when you live with them and love them, you feel the softness going inward, the round-cheeked flesh wobbly as custard, the boneless splay of the tiny hands. Their joints are melted rubber, and even when you kiss them hard, in the passion of loving their existence, your lips sink down and seem never to find bone. Holding them against you, they melt and mold, as though they might at any moment flow back into your body.

Where: at Gompachi in Nishi Azabu, Tokyo.
Celebrating 2014 arriving in a few hours, spending the last moments of 2013 together. 2013 took away 2 members of our family also we are together, standing strong toward the next year, it is going to be a good year! It has to be, as 2013 was such a challenging one for our family.