Every year our city does a wonderful Christmas tree lighting event downtown, and it’s one of our favorite family traditions. We were planning on going this evening (and excited about it)…until everyone got sick. Well, everyone but me. #nursemom
Yesterday Emma Vance suddenly came down with a headache mid-afternoon, slept until dinner and then ran a fever all night. It didn’t break until late this afternoon, and so she spent most of today pitifully crying and sleeping in her dark room. Cricket was up all night, sobbing “Help!” or “Mommy!” every half hour or so. She also developed a fever somewhere in the middle of the night and didn’t get any real consecutive sleep until dawn. So, of course, when it was time to wake the girls up for our usual Saturday-8-a.m. gym visit, I just nudged Ryan on my way out the door to tell him that I was leaving them at home this week. Too bad he had developed a killer head cold overnight as well, making his daddy duty doubly difficult. However, by the time I got home around 10:30, everyone seemed sick but in good spirits. Cricket even ran into my arms, giving me a giant hug and a grin. Things were looking brighter in the daylight.
And then Cricket threw up. All over me. Sigh.
Needless to say, all of the day’s and evening’s festivities were immediately canceled and replaced by baths and showers, by the stripping of beds and washing of clothes. The girls refused to take any of the “pink medicine” we had on-hand, insisting that they only wanted the purple kind. Sigh. With one parent down for the count, it wasn’t until after naps that everyone got a good dose of meds and finally felt better. By then all of us had moved from feverish to cabin-feverish, having barely gone downstairs all day. As a realistic remedy, I put the girls in their Christmas pajamas and pulled out our prefab gingerbread house to construct. (As you’ll see below, my gosh, I can NEVER get a confectionary structure to stand up straight…or at all.) The sugar and crafting brightened everyone’s spirit, and as I watched the clock move toward the start time of the Christmas tree lighting, I decided to that we would just have to deem this “The Year We Missed It Because Everyone Got Sick.” Sigh.
Instead, we cuddled on the couch and watched Disney Junior’s Christmas line-up. (With intermittent score updates from the SEC Championship.) When the sun started to set, I turned on our own tree, and as the glow grew brighter with the gradual darkness, I realized that it served as our own little tree lighting of sorts. It wasn’t too bad of an alternative, I suppose. I mean, Alpharetta’s tree will never elicit as much emotion from me as our own, especially since I commissioned the girls to make an angel for the top of our tree yesterday. (Our old star was too tall for our new tree + ceilings.) E.V. drew a beautiful angel (okay, so maaaaaybe it was only her head, and maaaaaybe Ryan said it looked like a pirate, but I love it!) and Cricket scribbled and stamped a perfect toddler-imagined halo. I think it is a perfect topper to our tree this year. ;)
