Josephine: The American Tour

We knew that we wanted to take Josephine back to the US to meet all of her friends and family back there.  And we figured that after she was a few months old and before I went back to work from maternity leave would be a good time to do that.  Therefore, at the end of March we packed up our things (it’s amazing how a tiny baby can add so much stuff to your suitcase) and boarded a plane headed for SFO.  We were a bit worried and anxious about how the flight would go and after talking to a few friends that had recently done the International flight with their infants, we decided that it shouldn’t be too bad. The worst she can do is cry but that won’t last forever.  From what I hear, it’s much easier to travel with a 3 month old than a baby who is crawling or walking.  And it turns out, Josephine did an amazing job on the flight there….which is about 11 hours.  I mean, as good as we could ask any little baby to do.  She slept for a few hours, ate, played, slept some more and really only started to get fussy towards the end.  But let’s be real, how many of us adults are fussy at the end of an 11 hour flight as well.  So yay Josephine for being so good!

We arrived at SFO, picked up our rental car and headed to my parents’ house in San Miguel.  Our American tour would start out with 5 nights in San Miguel visiting family.  We also baptized Josephine that weekend so it was a good excuse to have everyone gather together.  We had a great visit over several days to see Nate’s parents, my sister and her family, my brother and his family and many aunts and uncles and cousins.  Nate even managed to run the Paso Robles half marathon that weekend with my cousin Catherine.

Nate's mom made Josephine's dress

Congrats Nate and Catherine!

After that we headed up to the Bay Area where we split our time among a few friends’ houses staying in Morgan Hill, San Francisco and Alamo (thank you again Jenn & Casey, Christian and Kristine & Aaron!).  We had to spend at least one night in San Francisco since we never made it there during our last two trips to the US.  My how we have missed that city!!!  It didn’t hurt that we got to play around in the middle of a week day either.  We spent our time in the Bay Area catching up with friends and eating lots of good food.  It was so good to be back!

We then had one more stop to make before we headed back to Paris and that was to visit Nate’s Grandma in Arizona.  So we hopped on a flight to Phoenix to spend the last 3 nights with her.  Afterall, she had to meet her great-granddaughter.  And Grandma (or GG as she likes to be called) was thrilled to meet Josephine.  We had a wonderful visit with lots of cuddle time for GG with Josephine.  Nate even snuck in a Diamondbacks/Giants game on opening day.  Most likely his only Giants game for the season so you can imagine how excited he was to go to the game.

And after almost 2 weeks it was time to say goodbye to the US and head back home to Paris.  We had a great time and while we were indeed busy and moving around it felt like the perfect amount of time and itinerary.  And Josephine was an awesome trooper through it all.  She only had maybe 1-2 nights when we first arrived where she had to adjust to the jet lag but then slept wonderfully the rest of the time, no matter where we were.  She did so well meeting all sorts of new people too.  Returning home to Paris was a little bit more rough though.  As we always find, adjusting to the jet lag coming this way is much more difficult and it was no different with Josephine.  We had a pretty tough week with her but she finally slept a normal night one full week after returning.  Whew...what a trip!!!