After 15 months of waiting, Liam is up and walking!!! I love it!!!

After helping Katie settle in, my mom and I flew to Pittsburgh with Liam.  He started sneezing on the plane, but I didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary until he started holding his ears when we decended.  My mom and I were both thinking that he was coming down with a cold that had been passed around my family a few weeks before.  I guess Katie was just getting over it when they came to  Cali.  The next day Liam succumbed to the cold and was a wreck for the next three days.  It was terrible to see him so sick.  I have been lucky to keep him away from colds in the past and though he has had a few minor illness, they have never been anything like this past cold.  All he wanted to do was be held and watch The Wiggles.  I am sure that the three hour time change also helped things.  He wouldn’t eat and for anyone who has met Liam, they know how rare that is.  I think that seeing your baby sick is heartbreaking especially when they are too young to tell you what hurts and what helps. I suppose that is when Mommy sense kicks in and you just find how to read them. 

After Liam recovered,  we got to spend the rest of the trip with family.  It was so much fun seeing everyone even if it was freakishly cold.  I kept joking that I didn’t know I had come to visit the Arctic.  I think there were a few days when it only reached ten degrees.  I had forgotten what a pain snow is and how you have to heat your car up and scrape the windows and bundle up.  I can’t say that I miss all the mess that comes with the cold and snow.  I don’t think that the beauty of the stuff when it falls offsets all the downsides of it.  Liam seemed to agree with me.  We bundled him up the day after a snowfall and took him outside to play with his cousins.  He was only out for a max of ten minutes because he cried the entire time.  My California boy!

I got to spend some one-on-one time with each of Jess’s kids which was really great.  I took a different night of the week and we went shopping and got something to eat.  It was so nice to spend time with them individually and to get to know them better.  It amazes me how fast they are growing up.  I learned that Nicholas is an avid reader and loves to go to the bookstore.  He is also pretty funny!  I learned that Emma has great taste in clothing and food.  I will always let her pick out my clothes and order for me.  Christopher is a thinker and asks a lot of questions that are quite impressive.  He wanted me to explain to him how a building can hold up multiple floors so that they don’t fall down onto one another.  Big stuff for a six year-old.  I learned that Sammy tells people to call him Samuel Alexander and that he says the cutest things.  He said something that made me laugh and in response he said, “Yeah, I’m just funny like that!”  We also threw them a Harry Potter party which was so much fun.  We decorated their attic playroom and turned it into Gryffindor tower.  We draped different fabrics from the ceiling so it looked like a huge tent.  The kids wore their costumes and took potions, defense against the dark arts and divination classes.  There was dragon pox pizza and moldy doxy eggs for dinner in the great hall and then a trip to Honeydukes complete with cockroach clusters, butter beer ice cream floats, acid drops, pumpkin pasties and other candy from the books.  We had Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans but we forgot them downstairs so the next night we played jelly bean roulette!  It was great to see the faces when someone got a foul bean!

I got to see Allison and Josh and go shopping with Allison (something that normally doesn’t happen considering she’s not the biggest shopper).  It was wonderful to spend time with just the two of us and to see her with Liam.  She is going to be a great mom when this little one comes along.  I love seeing my family with Liam.  I can see how much they all love him and care about him.  It touches me so much to know that there is so much love in my family for my son.  I love how Nana just melts with him and how concerned she was when he was sick.  I love to see Jessica just scoop him up in her arms as though he was one of her own.  She is such a great example of motherhood.  I think now she sees how I have felt about her kids all these years.  I am so blessed to have such an amazing family who embraces me and my family.  I miss them so much, but know that the life that I have chosen in California is right for me.  Even if I have spent the last few days on the phone with them because it is too quiet without them here!  It may help the homesickness when Liam and I spend the day at the park and talking walks because it isn’t sub-zero degrees outside!!!  Well, at least I have one family member close to me now.  I guess I can wait a few more decades to get them all out!

In case you can't tell from his face, Liam is not a snow bunny

Mommy makes the snow somewhat tolerable

But it didn't take long for the icicle tears to reappear

Benjamin was a snowfish

Liam lounged with Emma...

and Mike...

and Allison

I love the look he is giving Ben. Ben was eating Cheerios one-at-a-time while Liam was taking them two fists at a time