Push button, receive bacon!

Well, it’s official. We’re having a boy! As some of you know, we had jokingly been saying that if we had a boy we would name him Takeru for Takeru Kobayashi, the number one competitive eater in the world. However, Takeru is not the easiest name to pronounce, and Kobayashi is no longer number one. That title is now held by Joey Chestnut, with Chicago’s own Patrick “Deep Dish” Bertoletti in second place. Plus, I’m not sure how amused little Takeru would be upon learning that he was named after a competitive eater.

Amy and I had discussed various girls names earlier, but couldn’t agree on one. Our discussions on boys names similarly went nowhere. Then Amy asked about Hideo, which was my great-grandfather’s name. That sounded OK. It also is a name that Americans may have heard of before because in 1995 Hideo Nomo became the first Japanese-born Japanese major leaguer to relocate to the United States to play Major League Baseball for the L.A. Dodgers. His success paved the way for the current influx of Japanese baseball players to MLB (Ichiro Suzuki, Tadahito Iguchi, and Kosuke Fukudome to name a few.) Hideo’s middle name will be William, after Amy’s dad.

So without further ado - meet Hideo!

Emiko’s vocabulary is getting pretty large. She can say things like mommy, daddy, doggie, monkey, nana (banana), Abby (Abby Cadabby), mou (mouth), Alma (her daycare owner), and she just learned the word cookie the other day. However, her two favorite words are Elmo and agua. She can spot Elmo from a long way away. The other day we were in Dominick’s and she points and says ‘Elmo.’ We were looking around to see where she saw Elmo but couldn’t see him. Finally, I spotted Elmo on a balloon shaped like a bus with all the Sesame Street characters inside. It must have been 50 feet away!

As for agua, Emiko only says the word agua, never water. Even when we say things like ‘would you like some water?’, she always replies by saying ‘agua.’ It’s pretty funny because we will be driving and Emiko will see a puddle on the side of the road and say she will say ‘agua.’ At daycare, Alma’s assistant, Lara, only speaks Spanish, so we’re not sure what other Spanish words Emiko knows.

Emiko is also getting good at repeating words that we say. It’s getting to the point that we now have to start self-censoring ourselves. Our most common swearword is douchebag which we now have changed to donut. Mmmm….donuts.

Last weekend we drove up to the Wisconsin Dells, the waterpark capital of the world. One of the highlights of the Dells is (or was) Lake Delton, a 10 ft deep man-made freshwater lake, built in 1927 to attract tourists to the area. During the flooding in June, a dike wall was washed out, allowing Lake Delton to empty in a matter of hours.

Here is what Lake Delton currently looks like.

Many resorts that relied on the lake to attract tourists have struggled this summer so we decided to rent a room at one of those resorts for the weekend. We stayed at Baker’s Sunset Bay resort which was nice. It looks like the last renovation was in the early 70s, but it was good enough for our needs. One of our reasons for staying there was that it had a kiddie pool, which Emiko loved!

We also played some miniature golf, went downtown to Monk’s for a burger and cheese curds, and visited the Wisconsin Deer Park to feed and pet the deer.

However, Emiko’s favorite thing at the Dells was a carnival ride at Riverview Park called Moby Dick. I don’t know if it was the motion of it going around, the music playing from it, or what, but she was drawn to it and started dancing right in front of it! She even saw it from across the street when we were at the deer park, shrieked, and ran over to the fence to get a better look!

Finally, it was time to go. We stopped by Market Square Cheese on the way out of town and also took a detour in Rockford to see the riverfront. We didn’t actually go to any of the waterparks because Emiko is not really old enough to enjoy them yet. Maybe next time!