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<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\nBut come they did. I had things mostly ready \u2013 guest rooms, toys for the kids, high chair and portable crib for the baby, plus all the Christmas decorations. Gifts were bought and wrapped. We had plans to visit several relatives in the week following Christmas and to take the boys to a few of their favorite places. The back yard was ready with toys so they could play outside, since winters are generally pretty mild in central North Carolina.<\/p>\n
My daughter warned me on her final phone call the day before they left that she and the baby weren\u2019t feeling well and seemed to be developing colds. I assured her that wasn\u2019t going to be a problem.\u00a0 Little did I know\u2026\u00a0 (Writers love to use that particular clich\u00e9, and it\u2019s so appropriate here.)<\/p>\n
They arrived a few days before Christmas, and things started going sideways almost immediately.\u00a0 The weather took a turn for the bitter, making it too cold for the boys to spend much time out-of-doors. In fact, temperatures remained ridiculously low for this area throughout their visit, making any outing an adventure in endurance.\u00a0I\u2019m talking daytime highs in the 20s and lows at night in single digits. Biting wind at times.<\/p>\n
But I had a good supply of toys, crayons, markers, scratch paper, and books to keep them entertained. They\u2019re good about playing on their own. Until all three of the older boys got sick as well a couple of days after they arrived. Then their Dad caught it. And my husband and I came down with it the day after Christmas.<\/p>\n
This wasn\u2019t the normal, garden-variety cold either, of the sort that makes you sniffle for a couple of days. We don\u2019t think it was the flu, since none of had the achy muscles and joints, bad headaches, and nausea that go along with flu, but it was a really ferocious cold that made people feel generally icky for close to a week, then left us all congested, coughing, sneezing, and running for an additional week to ten days.<\/p>\n
We had to cancel all the planned visits to relatives, forego the church services we wanted to attend, and forget some of the other places I wanted to take the boys. The kids were frequently, and understandably, cranky, mopey, and whiney.<\/p>\n
On top of that, the bug exacerbated a continuing throat problem in my son-in-law, which forced a trip to the emergency room \u2013 right as we were getting ready to sit down to Christmas dinner. And a day or two after that the bug set off the six-year-old\u2019s asthma. Fortunately they\u2019d brought along his medicine and a friend lent us a nebulizer, but his parents didn\u2019t get much sleep that night. In fact, sleep was in short supply for them for most of the visit with four wheezy, snuffly, stuffed-up children who all had trouble sleeping.<\/p>\n
We blew through (literally)\u00a0about 20 packages of wipes (for diaper changes and cleaning up runny noses) and several boxes of Kleenex for the adults.<\/p>\n
And yet, amid all the chaos and changes of plans, there were some wonderful moments and great blessings.<\/p>\n
Present-opening on Christmas morning went well for the most part. We do stockings first, and each of the boys got a foam play sword stuffed in the top. The two-year-old was so excited about the play sword, he went off brandishing it, and Christmas could have ended right there for him. We had to call him back and remind him there were other things in\u00a0his stocking.<\/p>\n
And there was the moment when the six-year-old unwrapped a present and found a book he desperately wanted. He literally shook with excitement and his face lit up with the kind of joy that, if bottled, could solve many of the world\u2019s major problems.<\/p>\n
The assistance of my older daughter, who lives nearby and has grown children of her own who were spending the holiday with their other grandmother, was invaluable during the chaos of Christmas day, and my sister-in-law Page was also helpful and understanding when dinner didn\u2019t go according to plan.<\/p>\n
At the end, they had to extend their say here a few days because of ice and snow clogging the roads back home on the day they\u2019d planned to leave. That, too, was a blessing in disguise. With the boys finally mostly healthy again, we were able to do some of the things I\u2019d wanted to do earlier, including outings to Safari Nation, a terrific indoor playground, the library for story time, and the Greensboro Children\u2019s Museum.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the biggest blessing was contained in something my daughter told me shortly before they left. In thanking me for all the help (though I still don\u2019t feel like it was that much), she said that if they\u2019d been at home with everyone sick, Christmas would\u2019ve been pretty dreary. Being with us meant she didn\u2019t have to handle everything herself, could grab a few extra naps she might not have had at home, and had extra hands to help with caring for the children. That made a huge difference for her.<\/p>\n
And I realized I was glad that she and the family were here, illness and all. Together we all had a better Christmas holiday than any of us would\u2019ve had on our own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(I originally posted this on the Classic and Cozy blog, but wanted to repost here.) But it was the one I got, and it was terrific in its own way. Just not the way I planned. It\u2019s always a better …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1481"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1483,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481\/revisions\/1483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}