Reading

Adam and Lottie are pretty good at playing together. Adam reads the book, and Lottie steals all his train tracks. She was trying to steal the book too.

Raking

Our neighbor raked their yard, so we were forced to rake too, or look like total slackers. Adam enjoyed riding his bike over the leaves. He did help bag the leaves after we raked.

Before we bagged, we took some pictures of the kids in the leaves. They thought it was great.

After we bagged, Adam decided to play linebacker and tackle all the bags. This was entirely his idea - he had the best time. You can hear a leaf blower in the background. Everyone else was cleaning up too.

Turn Your Head

Turn your head for a second, and Adam has scooted around Lottie so that they can lie down together. I swear, I did NOT pose this picture, I just grabbed my camera as fast as I could.

More Photos We Didn't Take

Here's another picture I meant to post earlier. The newspaper photographer took pictures at the Zama Homecoming Parade, and got a nice one of Chris and Adam. They published this one and another picture of all of us in the weekly paper. Notice the huge pile of candy on his stroller tray. I wonder why parades are a favorite...

At Church

The Zama High School yearbook advisor took a parish picture after Mass on Sunday. He also took pictures throughout Mass. He got a great one of Chris and Lottie, and was thoughtful enough to send us the picture (after tracking us down), along with a note saying how lovely he thought Lottie was. How nice!

Little Tudor

Me: "Cystal let me borrow The Tudors today."

Adam toots, loudly.

Chris: "Why borrow? We have a little Tooter right here."

Adam laughs and laughs.

Hats

Adam is finally letting Lottie play bucketheads with him. It's just a little too big for her yet.

Then Mom gave her another headdress. Nani was concerned.

Lottie Time

Lottie loves her alone time with Mommy when Adam is at Joy School. Today she put on a rolling clinic, rolling under the TV. She wasn't too happy when it was hard to roll back out.

Fingers in mouth - possibly working on more teeth?

Showing off those two bottom teeth.

Then she rolled over to the other side. Rolling...

oooh, a hanger...

more rolling....

and more rolling...

all the way to the easel. Yay!

Godzilla

Lottie just loves Adam's trains. So we call her Godzilla, the train wrecker. Here she is, destroying Adam's bullet train (shinkansin) setup.

Adam usually doesn't get too upset about the train-wrecking. He just loves his baby sister.

Yamanashi Wine Country

We have a four day weekend, so we decided to day trip to Yamanashi Wine Country. We took the train through some beautiful mountains (near Mount Fuji, although it was too cloudy to see it) to Katsunuma, which has a third of the total wineries in the county. The Japanese grow koshu grapes, which have thick skins that are resistant to rot (yay for Japanese humidity and rainy seasons). We were too late to see the grapes, but we were just in time to see the beautiful fall leaves and taste the newly bottled wines for 2008.
The first thing we saw as we were getting off the train was a small park with a train car. Adam thought it was the best thing ever. He ran over to the train, yelling, "Come here train. I want to huggle you!" I guess a huggle is a cross between a hug and a snuggle; that's a new one.

Once we started walking through the valley, we found some beautiful red bushes.

Then we walked through the valley and admired the dead vineyards. We did see some apple trees and persimmon trees.

The Japanese were hanging their persimmons. I guess they dry them to eat later?

We walked down the hill, through the valley, and back up another hill, to find Budono-oka, run by the city, which has 170 different wines available to sample (from all the different wineries in town). You pay 1100 yen (about $10) to get a metal tasting cup for sampling all the wine you would like. The entrance to the wine cellar had this picture of the grapes of Canan.

Adam didn't want to go to the cellar, ("Scary!") but soon realized that he could have fun dumping out the excess wine from Mommy and Daddy's tastings into the buckets. He soon claimed a tasting cup for himself. The wine was all self-serve. There were about 30 wine barrels with loads of wine on each. Since we couldn't read the labels, we just picked pretty labels, since there were way too many to try all of them. There were also racks of each wine available to buy right there. I can't even imagine this in the US. People would drink way too much or would not recap the bottles or spill all over. The Japanese were very careful, of course!

There was also a small festival going on outside the wine center. We tried the local specialty, hoto, a udon dish with lots of vegetables in a creamy broth. By the time we bought ours, there weren't any noodles left in the broth, but plenty of veggies. We told Adam the veggies and meat were noodles, and somehow, he bought it. He ended up eating almost all the stuff in the broth, even though he usually hates meat.

The view of the valley.

We also tried some pork and green onion kebabs. Adam got a free kebab because the girls selling them thought he was cute.

In the vineyard.

Outside the station, with the wine center in the background. Everyone had a great time, and the kids were super tired afterward!