A little family vacation with snow and birthdays

Grandma and Grandpa have March birthdays, so we decided to head up to Nagano and put on some festivities on the 11th.

Since we were going to be up in snow country and the weather looked good, we went up the mountain a day early and hit the slopes at Sun Meadows in Kiyosato for the first time. Beautiful blue skies, views of Fuji and Yatsugatake, and decent snow--a little slushy, but not bad.

I thought Michael might be ready to try skiing for the first time, and we were able to borrow skis and suits for free at the B&B we stayed at, so I put him in ski gear...but he got tired of falling and not being able to get up easily and went back to sledding after about an hour or so. I wanted to put him in the kids ski school in the afternoon, but he had had enough of skiing already by then. We'll try again next year.

Mei got tired of snow after about an hour too and Megu wasn't too keen on skiing either, so I was the only one who wanted to stay longer. The panorama lift at Sun Meadows takes you up 500m in altitude in a few minutes and I had fun crashing down the slopes at reckless speeds.

We stayed at a little "pension" (which is Japanese for B&B for some reason) called Little Bird, a very kid-friendly and reasonably priced place. The main draw for us was that they rent out skis, boots, and suits to guests for free--and amazingly they had my 29.5cm shoe size. That saved like 20,000yen in rental fees we would have had to pay. But that wasn't all. Little Bird has a kids' (and parents') dream-come-true play gym with a full-size racket ball court, billiards, darts, a table soccer game, air hocky and many other great little things to wear out 5 year olds like Michael. His favorite was the Foosball-like soccer game and I think we played for over an hour at night and also in the morning. I'll think about that for his birthday.

The next day we drove down into Saku in Nagano where my parents live and had a nice lunch and birthday party. Michael drew a highly artistic portrait of his grandparents and all of us in his family. Got him to write Happy Birthday!!!!!!!!!! (with 10 exclamation points as was his choice for emphasis) Love Maiki and Mei in his (again) highly artistic font of alphabet letters of all sizes and shapes. I have a picture of that somewhere, but not on this computer, so I'll try to put it up again.