Hokkaido, Japan

This was such a fun trip and we are incredibly thankful the Lord has given us such awesome, fun friends that we dearly love.  Hokkaido is exceptionally beautiful. If you followed the snowy road above outside Hirafu Village for about ten minutes, you’d find that gorgeous valley of  chalets where we stayed, near the base of Mt. Yotei.

Cam and I were a little nervous about how the baby would do both flying and traveling a whole day there and back + sharing a cabin when he, ahem, likes to make his presence very well known and has a very loud voice when he chooses to do so. But our little love did fantastic! We’re proud of him. And our friends are still friends with us 😉  Before we were about to take off in the plane, we took a deep breath thinking he was going to scream his head off, and I whispered to Cam, let’s pray!! He quietly did with me. John nursed and slept the entire first hour and apart from a few outbursts the rest of the day traveling, did really well. When we were in the NICU after he was born, the nurses gave him a sweetie when they really needed him to calm down. It was basically a paci dipped in sugar water. So I brought a plastic baggy with sugar water and a couple pacifiers to give him for the ascent/descent if he wouldn’t nurse. He loooved them! It helped him to swallow and clear his ears. He flirted the entire trip back with a pretty Japanese lady sitting behind us, belly laughing!, and didn’t even notice when we had descended and landed. We shouldn’t have let ourselves stress about it. Maybe that’s something you get over once you have multiple kids.  We’re so grateful that he traveled well in a quiet and polite culture and had a blast with all of us.
He’s proved himself an adventurous mini traveler! Such a good thing in this family!