I have two children, both married. They live on opposite sides of the country. My son and his wife live in Los Angeles, having moved there in the summer of 2008. My daughter and her husband (along with my cute little granddaughter) live in Baltimore, in the area where they both went to college. As you can imagine, this makes whole family get-togethers somewhat problematical.
As you might expect, I see the Baltimore side of the family much more often than the Los Angeles side. I find this somewhat upsetting, as it almost seems as if I favor my daughter over my son. That isn't the case at all. But I do find that the distance to my son and daughter-in-law makes it seem as if I hardly know them since they got married. My wife and I try to get out there at least twice a year, and we try to get them to come east at least twice a year, but it still doesn't help get rid of the disconnect that is always there. While I talk to my son on the phone or via e-mail regularly, it's not nearly the same as seeing him and his wife face-to-face. My wife and I both miss him terribly. It's always a sad scene when we have to go home and the long airplane flight can be tough on both us us. They are planning to move back east at some point, but there's no real timetable for that right now.
However, it looks as if we will be getting the entire family together in Baltimore during the winter. This should be a fun time for all of us, as my son and his wife haven't seen their niece since last May and she's really changed. At the same time, I worry about the weather. Last February, my wife and I went down to Baltimore to visit, and we got snowed in by a record storm--30 inches of snow in a 36 hour period. While that is a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm for the mid-Atlantic states, you never know when it could happen again. Hopefully, it won't happen again THIS winter.
