SHOGO HAS A BIRTHDAY SEPTEMBER 3, 2012

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHOGO STARR

SHOGO TURNS 15 ON THE 3RD OF OCTOBER, 2012

I'm going to have to read in my journal about the details surrounding his birth. It's been fifteen years.  Awe, here's a good one by his mother. Hiromi said that Gary and their home teacher were more anxious and nervous than she was about the birth of the baby. She said that Gary wasn't there to take her to the hospital so their home teacher took her.  He hadn't dealt with a pregnant woman before. He had married a woman who already had three children. Excitedly he asked Hiromi if they should get clean rags, or what were they suppose to do!   She looked at him and thought, "You have watched too much television!" My comment, "We don't need rags or boiling water, just get me to the hospital!" Gary arrived very soon after.  I understand Richelle was there soon after too.

Lanny and I were able to get there the following day to see Shogo. He looked a little like his sister Elica.

A few weeks later Shogo was blessed by his father. All our family was there except Angie who was in New Jersey.

Richelle was expecting in early December and Stefanie in late December, so Shogo would be saying goodbye in heaven to his soon to be cousins on earth. (That's an assumption of course.

Let's scoot along some years. In 2005 Shogo and his family moved to Japan for two years. He attended school and was taught in the Japanese language. Both he and his sister were fast learners and dedicated students but the first year I'm sure was not too easy for them. 

Shogo joined the soccer team which was probably his first experience on a soccer team. Since then he has played soccer every year. Several years ago they played one game in Moses Lake and Grandpa and I went to watch and cheer. They did pretty well, although I think they were beaten. I've included a small segment of a video of that game. I'm sure if we were to see a video of Shogo playing now we would be awed.

Shogo is a person with many faces and most of them make you laugh.  Shogo laughs with you.   He is a very personable young man, and enjoys making people laugh.   FACES OF SHOGO:

While in Japan they had lots of opportunities to visit with their Grandpa and Grandma Takami in Tottori.

Shogo is very good at math and has been since in his early years. It seems most of the grandsons are good at math. It's hereditary. Uncle Don was especially inept in the mathematics.

We do love you Shogo and enjoy your exuberance and kindness to those around you. We enjoy your talents as a clarinet player, a piano player, your sense of humor and your many faces; funny faces, cute faces, out of this world faces.

Welcome to the dramatics. You are definitely Grandpa Alexander's Baird's grandson, thrice removed. He helped put together the theater in Brigham City for President Lorenzo Snow, the prophet years ago and he and some of his family did many performances.  Gary sent me some information about Shogo which I've included below.  I just listened to the video he sent of Shogo playing the organ.  It's very good.  His great grandmother thrice removed, Lorietta Archibald Starr was very talented at the organ, as well as his aunt Sandra. 
Happy Birthday dear Shogo, Love, Grandma and Grandpa Starr 

9/02/2012

Shogo Hiram Starr arrived two years after his sister who thought that her new little baby brother was just the neatest thing in the world (My, how things have changed!). For years he loved grabbing and holding onto his toes with both hands. He would occasionally even use a foot as a pacifier – a habit that he fortunately broke himself of before entering junior high.

Shogo has always been an intelligent boy – more or less. One moment he’ll astound you with his ability to calculate numbers in his head or to distinguish patterns faster than Superman can change a diaper. The next moment he’ll ask a real “No Duh” question, or you’ll find him in his bedroom walking around in circles searching for some object that is lying in plain sight on the foot of his bed.

When he was nearing seven years old, we took a trip to Yellowstone. I decided to take Elica and Shogo a little off the beaten path so we could get a closer look at a lake in the distance hoping to catch sight of a bear. Not doing anything exceptionally dangerous, we made our way carefully down from the road out onto a very uneven rocky surface. I went first so that I could turn around and catch the kids as they came slipping down the slope. I then began looking around for the best route to get further down. I don’t know what got into him, but Shogo was so excited that he took off as fast as his little legs could go making a beeline past me and straight toward the edge of what would have been a very serious fall. Luckily, I was close enough to reach out and grab hold of his arm forcing a sharp U-turn back toward the safe side of the terrace. Not trusting my son’s understanding of the forces of gravity, I immediately informed Hiromi that we were coming back up.

We have yet to get it confirmed by a medical expert, but we strongly suspect Shogo’s head of being abnormally heavy in proportion to the rest of his body. We arrived at this conclusion due to our observation that when seated on a sofa his head will inevitably sink to the floor and his feet will rise to the top.

While it could be said that every person is unique, Shogo is unusually unique. As evidence, I submit the following:

(1) We have plenty of pictures of Shogo, but have yet to be successful taking one with him in any kind of a normal pose.

(2) Shogo really likes to “move it move it move it” like they do on Madagascar. He is apparently unable to enter or leave a room (at home) without shaking his groove thing. And he will continue to stand there and shake it until he is acknowledged.

(3) Perhaps I should not be revealing this, but Shogo suffers an addiction. An addiction fed by his own mother, who – you could say – is also the person responsible for introducing him to the “white candy” in the first place. Yes, Shogo is a heavy user of Half & Half coffee creamer (aka “liquid crack”).

Hiromi enjoys her occasional iced mocha latte café ole cappu-frappuccino. And she’ll pick up a handful of sacrament cup sized creams to add to the concoction. One day Shogo asked if he could drink a creamer shot straight – and he was instantly hooked. Ever since that day, Shogo has been unable to enter a fast food franchise without swiping a handful of creamer shots to go with his burger and fries (and then a couple extra for the road on the way out).

Shogo appears to be a popular kid with a lot of friends. There are quite a few that I’ve never actually met – busy as I am – but I hear about often enough to have memorized their names: Mario and Luiji (I believe they are brothers), Yoshi (whom I assume is Japanese), Kirby (It sounds to me like he’s got a bit of a weight problem the way Shogo describes his eating habits), and Don Keekong (I’ve spelled his last name phonetically – Chinese?). It’s nice to see that he hangs out with boys of various ethnicities.

Shogo has been blessed with a lot of talent and inherited enough of the stubbornness gene to succeed at most anything he sets his mind to. From a very young age he has been interested in solving puzzles. Hiromi would order books of mazes for him to solve. One of his favorite toys is the marble maze in a ball thing that requires tremendous coordination as well as concentration. As a family we once attempted a game of SET where you win by being the fastest to find patterns in the cards. We ended up playing 3 against Shogo and still went down in defeat. But while he is quick at solving problems and finding patterns, he is rather slow at strategizing. Playing a game of Chess, Risk, Catan or even Uno, Shogo spends far more time than the rest of us taking a turn as he attempts to determine the most advantageous option available to him (“Same number or color, Shogo, that’s all there is to it!”).

Shogo takes on challenge after challenge. At the end of the last school year, he taught himself to play a pretty complicated version of the Pokémon theme song on the organ for the junior high school talent show. He and his buddy, Trevor (on the drums), were a big crowd pleaser. Having observed Elica make one, he spent a week of his summer painting a large pixelated poster for his bedroom (a Nintendo related subject, of course). This summer he managed to outrun his father (by seconds) in a 4-mile fun run. He’s in his seventh year on the soccer team. And this year he will be tackling a math class two years above his grade level. We are really proud of him. Happy Birthday, Son.