One on One

Ian had a business trip to Rochester, New York last weekend. He left at 6am Thursday morning and came back 2am Monday morning. He and his co-worker/friend, Kris, were able to see Palmyra, the Sacred Grove, The Statue of Liberty (from afar with fireworks), Philadelphia, many Washington D. C. monuments and Niagara Falls in one weekend (after the work related stuff on Thursday evening and most of the day Friday)! They put 1,400 miles on their rental car and went without a lot of sleep to make that happen. His Garmen GPS got them around as if they'd been to the east coast a million times before. A pretty remarkable site seeing trek.

So while Daddy was at "the ocean" or so I told Liam, I packed our weekend full of local activities. This plan insured smiles and happiness rather than scowls and snappiness (which is what boredom at home is known to cause).

First I have to report Liam's computer skills that took flight on Friday. He not only paints, he navigates to different games now and decides what he wants to do. Watching him get the hang of a game or activity so fast blows my mind! He's smarter than I am on some of those kid web sites. Uptoten.com is a favorite right now. He was making cookies for a long time this morning (cookie cutters, baking and decorating). But back to the weekend...

Friday night we went out to dinner and then to Color Me Mine for some painting fun. He was so tickled picking out his baby turtle to paint (and I found a smaller tile for him to paint too). We saw some design ideas in a kids finger painting book, but those ideas never came to fruition. Liam went crazy mixing all the colors on his ceramic pieces. He kept getting up and running over to the paints and asking for new colors. I was glad I didn't have a piece of my own to focus on, supervising his artistic side was plenty of work. (Warning to parents: You don't get to take your work home until 3-4 days later when the pieces have been glazed and baked in the kiln. Liam was sad about not taking his baby turtle home. I explained to him many times that the turtle had to go in the oven and would change color. So that is a story he's added to his repertoire. "Turtle in oven and it change color...")

That night Liam had his regular outdoor bath and went to bed with excitement for the next day. He had been talking about the animals all week long so I thought we should make a trip to Farm Country Saturday morning... he was so excited and kept saying "see elphants?" Then I'd have to rattle off all the farm type animals he would see. How does he remember our zoo trip from over a month ago?

It ended up that my friend, Miriam, contacted me Thursday suggesting the same Farm Country idea. So we met up at 10am with our kids and had a nice visit together.

Five year old Elizabeth was kind enough to take this photo of us:

After Liam's fun time following Elizabeth around, seeing baby calves and riding the horses twice, we said our good-byes. Liam and I went to Iceberg for lunch then headed home for naps.

Immediately after naps we suited up and went to the pool. I was determined that we were going to do something water related on such a hot summer day! We had the most glorious 2 hours in the water together! We played in the kiddie area a lot, went on the HUGE water slides a few times and also played in the deeper pool. Liam would jump off the edge to me and I'd guide him back to the side. He'd get out of the pool all by himself once he was to the edge. I found it humorous watching him struggle each time as his bulky life jacket would hinder his movement. We thoroughly enjoyed our time in the water - splashing, laughing and focusing on each other. I was only able to take a couple photos when we first got there and then right before we left. Here is my water baby!

Too bad the tattoo guy wouldn't move for a few great photos I got of him jumping into the water.

The rest of our evening included taking a hot shower, eating dinner and watching Toy Story.

Sunday Liam did great in Sacrament Meeting and in Nursery. Once again I enjoyed my two hours of classes. We had lunch and took naps once we got home. The day was too hot to really enjoy outdoors, so after naps we played games on the computer together. At 5pm our neighbor, Laura, called and invited us over for dinner. We walked over there (Liam rode his trike) and dinner was so nice! Manicotti! Liam ate two helpings! He and Jason played well together and we headed home around 7pm. Sprinkler fun commenced, then an outdoor bath.

It was an awesome weekend with my boy! I am glad we were able to do so much together. I have to note, though, that Liam mentioned Daddy many times. He missed him terribly and I could tell he would have loved Ian to play all weekend with us.