Bill Belew has raised 2 bi-cultural kids, now 34 and 30. And he and his wife are now parenting a 3rd, Mia, who is 8.

My big brothers grew up in Japan. One of their friends was born in Japan but moved to Far East Russia.

My brothers could never remember walking through a public door that they had to open. They were always automatic doors. Apparently, Japan is pretty good at that sort of thing.

My Netflix Watched Instantly List

Marissa and Tasha, their friends who grew up in Russia never met a door that they didn’t have to push open with all their might. 20 years ago there was no automatic doors in Russia.

Daddy says I am growing up in exciting times. There are lots of things that I have that were not even imagined when my brothers were growing up, much less when my daddy was growing up.

We have Netflix. I love Netflix.

Here are my reasons:

1. I can discover things on Netflix.

My Little Pony. Jake and the Neverland Pirates. Strawberry Shortcake, Littlest Pet Shop, Once Upon a Time, Disney!!

2. I can take Netflix with me.

I can watch it at the park, in the car, at the beach, on the way to school, at the restaurant.

3. I can stop and start a Netflix movie in different places and at different times.

Seriously. How do they do that? I started watching Bratz this morning on my daddy’s phone.  We got to school before it finished. On the way home, I watch a little more but still didn’t finish. While waiting for dinner to get ready I switched to my iPad-mini. The movie started where I left off!!! I couldn’t believe it.

Dinner was ready and I still wasn’t finished, so I paused. After dinner I went to the big TV and turned on Netflix. Good googie moogie, the Bratz movie started where I stopped on my iPad mini. Who told my TV where I was? Is there a Netflix spy in my house, in my daddy’s car, in the park and all these places? They are really tricky.

4.  Netflix has a phone number!

And they answer the phone, too! Daddy would have fallen off the sofa except he was laying down when he called. The password got changed and the TV needed to reprogrammed. (Yeah, I am only 5-years old and I know that word. I know buffering and reboot and …, too.) Daddy got online and there was a Netflix phone number. He called and a real person, Jason, answered.

A couple of minutes of talking and Jason knew the problem. We got OUR remote out. Jason told Daddy what to do without even seeing our remote. Up up, down, down, left, right, down down, up, up, up, up. It sounded like he wanted daddy to do some exercises. But daddy said he already went to the gym.

But it worked!! The Netflix account was deactivated and it was time to login again … and a few minutes later daddy and mommy were watching Drop Dead Diva.

But mommy got sleepy from all that button pushing and because daddy came home late.

But make no mistake, Netflix was there when we needed them … in a real person, too.

Talk to Bill and others about their experiences raising bi-cultural Japanese-American kids.