Nat’s parents are coming this weekend to celebrate his 29th birthday on January 21. Of course, it’s as a nice bonus, they’ll be able to see their grandson. 
 We’ve been so blessed by all the opportunities that Sean has had to seen his grandparents. Since he’s been born, there hasn’t been a month that has gone by where he hasn’t seen at least one of his grandparents.  Let’s recap, shall we?
July:Â Both my parents were here on the day that Sean was born.
August:Â Nat’s parents and my parents were here to see the cute little newborn.
September: My dad came out when Nat was at a conference in Canada. He was a great help!  Nat’s parents and Ethan also came out. It was the first Thompson get together since Sean had been born.
October:Â My mom came out to see Sean because she missed seeing him in September (she went back to Taiwan to see her sick father).
November: We went out to Massachusetts for Anne and BJ’s wedding and also to see both great grandparents. Later that month, we went to Colorado for Thanksgiving with the Thompsons.
December:Â We headed down south to warm Texas for Christmas.
We’ve put up three new videos of Sean.  The three videos are:
 Should we be surprised that he likes rice cereal? I think not, seeing that he’s half Chinese. 
Here are some Christmas break pictures of Sean, courtesy of my mom.
My mom put it best yesterday, “Chicago sucks!” Ok, the city doesn’t suck, but traveling through O’Hare during the winter can pretty much suck. We found out yesterday morning that our original flight from Houston to O’Hare was canceled. After a few hours of deliberation and checking the status of other flights into O’Hare, we decided to go ahead and fly home. The flight we were rebooked on was delayed out of Houston for a little over an hour. When we landed in O’Hare, we found out that the 3 earlier flights into Champaign were delayed, so we tried our luck getting on standby on one of those flights. In the end, we were on standby for 2 flights as well as holding boarding passes for our existing flight. We kept watching the board to see which flight was going to leave first, and we got on the one that boarded around 9PM*. Just when we thought we were homebound, we were delayed further by maintenance problems and waiting to be de-iced. When we finally pushed back, our plane stopped in a holding area b/c our flight plan had been kicked off the air traffic control list so the pilot needed to refile our flight plan. We finally touched down around 11:40PM in Champaign only to find that our gate was occupied by another flight that got in a few minutes earlier. Nat just had to laugh when we were waiting on the tarmac in Champaign b/c we’ve never had to wait on a plane for a gate. But we made it home, safe and sound.
Throughout this whole ordeal, Sean was a trooper. He slept almost all the way from Houston to O’Hare, and all the way from O’Hare to Champaign (including that hour we were waiting on the plane). He didn’t fuss or cry too much and just took all the running around O’Hare like a pro.  Good job son!
* The original time of departure was 5PM.
