Doc, Doc, Doc!!!

His new favorite word is now officially “Doc”. There is a cartoon here that he watches with a little girl who fixes broken toys and she is called “Doc” and he can’t stop saying her name! Although he is very vocal now and makes his opinion known. He is saying mama, dada, anna, doc, and a bunch of other unrecognizable sounds as well.  He finally kicked his month long cold as the weather here seems to be warming up! He is now running around the house with reckless abandon falling everywhere.

He his hitting his head on everything and it almost looks like we beat the little kid.  He knows when we are coming for him and he runs his fastest and tries his hardest to escape usually ending in a big crash.

He is growing so fast.  He eats so much now and learns something new every day.  He his dancing and spinning when we have music on, he is blowing bubbles in the bathtub, he is trying unsuccessfully to eat with a spoon by himself, he can open and close doors, and turn off and on lights.  He has also picked up a rather dangerous hobby of trying to climb anything he can as well.  That scares me because he can get pretty high on some things.

We still give him a bottle before bed at around nine which as him waking up around midnight with a loaded diaper.  He was sleeping in our bed a lot while he was sick so he has become accustomed to that and once he wakes up at midnight he doesn’t want to go back to sleep unless its in our bed. So hopefully we can wean him off this bedtime bottle so he can sleep through the night.

I will post a few more videos of dancing and climbing here this week once I have uploaded them to the computer.  But it’s been awhile since I posted anything on the little man so I wanted to give everyone an update that he is doing great.

Takasu Snow Festival (高鷲雪祭り)

Picture

Every year around the middle of February a big snow festival is held in Takasu. The main point of the snow festival is the making and competition of these 3-6 meter snow sculptures. Unfortunately, I could not attend but I did end up taking a few pictures of the sculptures about 5 days after the festival.  They are in disrepair and melting but still very intact.  Mr. Zues here was the winner this year.
I remember last year we attended and the temperature was -15 degrees Celcius with strong winds.  SO COLD!! This year was the exact same but I guess that’s what you can expect to encounter when going to a snow festival. They also have many stalls with various local foods and a handful of little fair games for the kids.  In addition to the food and games they have all sorts of snow attractions such as huge inner tube snow slides, getting pulled on inner tubes behind a snowmboile, horse rides, and a few other attractions as well. The festival is held in the local hot spring parking lot so once you are good and frozen you can enter the hot spring and relax for a while before heading back out.  It’s a nice outing for families or dates if you don’t mind the cold.