Saturday, December 20, 2008
Our entire family travelled 5 1/2 hours to attend our extended family Christmas celebration. My niece Alli (same age as Katie) threw up a few times that morning, but her dad (my brother) assured us that since she didn't have a fever, he was pretty sure she wasn't sick and that she had just consumed some spoiled milk. None of us wanted to skip out on the party after driving so long to get there, so we all hoped my brother was correct. Unfortunately, he was not.
There were 29 of us attending the party. Over the next several days, 17 of us had full-fledged stomach flu and several others were under the weather. I can't believe a toddler could be so contagious to get us all sick, esp. since the party was only a few hours long and some of us were avoiding her possible germs (including me).
On a happy note, we did have great family time, both at the extended family gathering that afternoon, and back at the hotel that evening with just my immediate family. Since Stephen and Lindsey were heading to Seattle for Christmas, we exchanged gifts with them at the hotel.
Sunday, December 21, 2009
The next day we all travelled back home, and while John, Katie and I made it home before the flu hit, my parents and brothers were not so lucky. They ended up spending the night at my brother Mike's apartment because they couldn't stay out of the bathroom long enough to make it the next hour home. The flu hit Katie and I that night. I won't go into the nasty details, but for me it was 12 hours of violent illness followed by a few days of feeling awful. Katie's little body thankfully didn't have to deal with the intensity I had to deal with, but it did take her over a week to fully recover. And that week unfortunately included Christmas Day. John stayed home from work to care for us and thankfully he didn't get it as bad as we did -- just felt punky one day.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Our first Christmas Eve adventure was a trip to the pediatrician's office to see if Katie was well enough to escape isolation on Christmas Eve. No such luck. We were supposed to spend Christmas Eve with John's family, including a super-nice meal and a Christmas Eve church service, but the idea of passing along the grossest flu ever forced our decision to stay home. We were really bummed that day -- John had never spent Christmas away from his family before -- but decided to make our own Christmas Eve traditions at home. Off I went to CVS to pick up medicine and Pedialyte for Katie, as well as a number of stocking stuffers to make the evening a little more special.
So if we carry on our 2008 Christmas Eve into long-term traditions, here's what we'll have:
- Watch "Elmo's Potty Time" DVD.
- Eat Boston Market takeout for our special Christmas Eve dinner.
- Place a two-foot Christmas tree on a TV so we can put presents under it. [We hadn't bothered to get a full-size tree this year for many reasons (we weren't planning to be home for Christmas, Katie would have made a mess of the needles and ornaments all season, I was at half-capacity because of pregnancy and broken foot, etc.). I'm so glad John's parents were nice enough to mail us a little tree so we had one to use!]
- Watch Katie not get through all of her gifts because she's too tired and sick to want to open any more.
- Wait until Katie goes to bed to exchange gifts between John and Jen.
I'm happy to lose most of these traditions in future years, but I like the last one. It was fun to be able to immediately enjoy the gifts that John and I gave each other, rather than have to wait for Katie to go to bed. John gave me a really nice foot/calf massager (esp. appropriate for pregnant feet!) and I gave him a Wii game system. Here are some photos from Christmas Eve.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
We expected to have to stay home on Christmas Day as well. We were supposed to celebrate that day with my family and my grandma, but my grandma ended up being too sick to join us, and the rest of my family had already had the flu, so we ended up being able to spend Christmas Day with them after all. It wasn't quite the exuberant Christmas our family usually has, between still recovering from the flu and some hard times that certain family members are going through right now, but it was still so wonderful to be able to spend that special time with my brothers and parents and niece and nephew. What a wonderful family I have. Here are some photos from Christmas Day.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Katie was finally well enough on Saturday for us to make the hour trek to John's parents' new house to celebrate with his family. As soon as we arrived, Katie was bombarded with what seemed like dozens of presents! She was in paradise! After 20 minutes of "Katie Christmas", we finally started exchanging gifts amongst the adults. And that's when John and I realized with horror that because of a miscommunication, we had accidentally left almost all of our gifts for his family at our house! Ack!
Thankfully John's family had flexible timing, because our Saturday afternoon visit (that was originally supposed to be a Christmas Eve visit) then turned into a full-weekend visit. I went back home, picked up the gifts and some overnight items, went to a party some of my high school friends were having, and came back up to John's parents that night. And it all turned out for the best, because we had so much more time with John's family than we would have had with our original or even our secondary plans. John's train-loving father enjoyed showing Katie a local train display, and she learned to say "choo choo". We had several meals with John's family, attended church with them on Sunday morning, had an extra round of gift exchange thanks to our little mishap, and enjoyed a sleepover at JayPa and Oma's house (incidentally, "Grammy" has now changed her name to "Oma" since Katie can say "Ama" and since "Oma" is a German term for grandma). Here are some photos from our weekend.
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