Beansprout

A few days ago, over breakfast, we were talking about the three Japanese alphabets--Kanji (which has 4000-5000 characters!), hiragana (about 50), and katagana (or something like that, with abouth another 50). Hiragana and katagana were developed to write foreigner's names phonetically, but Keiko decided to try to figure out Kanji symbols for Lansen and me. Lansen's name means Battle Royale, which we all had a good laugh over. His dad is in the military, but he's a pretty darn peaceful soul from what I've seen. The kanji they chose for Mare means Blossom that develops from a bud. I thought that was super cool. Better than House of bitter waters, which is the biblical derivation for my full name. They went through a few iterations to arrive at our kanji names, and one for Lansen involved a character that looked like the number 4, so he dubbed himself Funky Fresh Four, and since my name is a whole sentence, he shortened it to Beansprout. It makes for a fun inside joke. My name in katagana (I think?) looks like XP, so that's another possibility, but beansprout seems to be sticking better. I dig it. My mom used to call me peanut, so perhaps I'm finally germinating in life? lol