This Christmas Season - Part 2

How is it that Christmas seems to sneak up on us every year? I don't mean that generally, I mean, us, the Hipps family, and me most of all. It's like I'm the only person on the planet who didn't have twelve months to come up with a plan.

In fairness to myself (or, more likely, as a way of making excuses), it seems to me that we did have a lot going on. To start, the cruise which I mentioned in the previous post came with a great deal of stress and mental effort in the form of getting Angie a passport. For this, she would need her birth certificate, which we found easily in the filing cabinet where my highly-organized wife keeps all of our important papers, and which was promptly mislaid and feared to have been accidentally thrown away. I mean, this puppy was missing for weeks. Angie was born in Hawaii, so we had to apply to Hawaii for a new copy and pray that a recent copy of a Hawaiian birth certificate would mean more to the folks in the passport office than it does to some people. A day or two before the replacement arrived, we did finally manage to find the birth certificate in a place it totally shouldn't have been, and Angie was able to make her rescheduled passport appointment. Hooray!

Our next pre-holiday hurdle was... the dishwasher. I was going to go into a lengthy explanation of this debacle, but in the interest of time, suffice to say that our dishwasher went to that great appliance service center in the sky. Actually, it died on us and went to rest against the side of our house where it currently resides while we wait for the yard gnomes to drag it to their underground lair or something; I've forgotten why I haven't taken it to the city dump already. Anyway, it shuffled off its heating coil and we had to buy a replacement. I realize you may say that we didn't have to buy a replacement, in that it's a modern convenience and we could just wash the dishes by hand. We tried this for over a week, but with the number of dishes we generate, we were spending all of our free time at the sink, to the point where the kids were having to come in there to say their prayers at night and, in the daytime, asking if they were really careful, could they please just drive the van themselves to a park or someplace just to get out of the house. So a replacement became a mental health requirement, and one was found and purchased at BrandsMart.

This was all well and good, except that a) in the interest of saving money, we installed it ourselves, which was a lot of hard and, at times, painful work, and b) it took up a sizable chunk of our would-be Christmas budget. Oh well.

We followed this up with Thanksgiving, for which Angie and the kids went to Columbus for the week and I arrived Thanksgiving Eve. The purpose here was to give Joshua a good long time to hang out with his Grandmama, since she'd be coming less than two weeks later to stay with us while Angie went cruising. The week after that we prepped for the cruise with meal-planning and whatnot, and the week after that was the cruise, which I believe I've covered enough. After a day or so for Angie to readjust to family life, we were finally able to buy our first Christmas presents on Thursday, December 17th. Today is Wednesday, December 23rd, two days before the blessed event, and I believe we're almost done with our shopping. Well, Angie's done, and I'm nearly done. Fortunately for me, there's hardly anybody out shopping this late in the season, so I should be able to wrap things up today. Actually, I probably won't have time to wrap until tomorrow. Or Saturday.

This Christmas Season - Part 1

So, the updates to the blog have been lacking. I'd like to say that's because life has been so busy and exciting that we just haven't had time to write about it. Some weeks that is true, but mostly we're just exhausted at the end of the day and don't get around to describing even the interesting events. I suspect this has a lot to do with a certain someone who tends to keep us on our toes.

Interesting events have happened, however, the most recent of which began last week. Last Wednesday, Angie and 5 of her friends went on a cruise to celebrate the 40th birthday of one of the friends. A great time was had by all until the last scheduled day of the cruise, when fog in the port kept them from being able to dock, and they had to spend another night at sea. I hear you saying, "oh, waa, an extra free night on a cruise ship; I feel so sorry for them," and I can see your point. However, these are (mostly) moms we're talking about here, and, to hear them tell it, once they'd switched into the mindset of "I'm going home to see my children," then the fun of being on the cruise ended and the anxiousness to get home began. Also, there was a loud and disturbingly violent fist-fight across the hall on the last actual night, which did nothing to soothe their anxiety. They did finally make it home safe and sound, however...

which is good, because while they were away, times at the Hipps household were a bit on the rough side. My wonderful mom came to stay with us while Angie was away, and I honestly don't think I'd have made it without her. Not that I couldn't handle the kids normally, you understand, for even days at a time; it's just that this was not normal. Maggie had a cold, which made her pitiful at first. Joshua seemed to be getting one when Angie left, and so for the first couple of days I treated it as such. He got a fever, I gave him Tylenol. He had trouble breathing, I put him on the nebulizer. Not the way I'd like to spend the Christmas season, but we were managing.

By Saturday, however, things had not improved. In fact, he'd been waking up every hour or so and just screaming every night. The post linked above mentions that Joshua had "yet to discover just how wonderful his grandmama is," but brother, I believe he knows it now! She would get up and rock him or hold him and he would sleep kind of upright in her arms for a couple of hours in the night. Much Diet Coke (and a little wine) was consumed during the daytime to keep us awake and ease the stress of screaming baby. He was never his usual bright, sunny self, and although he actually slept really well Saturday night (I even thought his breathing sounded better when I woke up Sunday), he pretty much slept for the entire day Sunday. He was incredibly clingy, and just really pitiful. On Monday, the doctor pronounced that he had RSV and an ear infection, which explained the fever and screaming. He perked up a little after the first round of antibiotics, but the biggest improvement came the next day with the return of Mommy! The change was just astounding! He went from listless and pitiful to energetic and happy in about 6 minutes. All of a sudden he was babbling and cooing, crawling around the whole house with a smile on his face as if all was right with the world! I felt like I could breathe a sigh of relief for him at last, and it started to feel like Christmas around here again.

In Part 2 of This Christmas Season, I'll be discussing why it is that we just bought our first Christmas presents yesterday, December 17th...