Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I hope that you were able to enjoy the company of your precious family and friends during this Christmas season. My family has had a rather eventful holiday “break” so far. Thankfully we are all still alive and well, but we have not really had a break just yet. With eight people living under one roof, there is bound to be some excitement from time to time. All of our events are somewhat humorous now so I will share in hopes that it will bring some laughter into your day.

We completely moved and rearranged three rooms in our house. This included moving three sets of beds, a hide-a-bed (very heavy), computer desk (very large), book shelves and all kinds of miscellaneous boxes and furniture. We did this to accommodate our daughter who is a sophomore in college and has discovered that it really IS cheaper to live at home and drive 15 miles to college. Thankfully, I have a husband and a son who have forgiven me for changing my mind on the location of the 500 pound hide-a-bed and computer desk. After they hauled them up two flights of stairs, I decided that I wanted them back where they came from. Oops! (I still got a few gifts on ChristmasJ)

On Christmas Eve we had lunch at my brother’s home which is about two and a half hours from my home. We planned to leave there and get home before the snow storm hit. WRONG!! We left in time, but the problem was that the storm moved in earlier than predicted. Soooo, we got to drive the last 50 miles in ice, fog, sleet changing to snow and then blizzard-like conditions. To make matters worse my husband was driving our oldest daughter’s car which is almost twenty years old. The age of the car was not the problem. The problem was that the defroster barely worked and he had to stop to get the ice off the windshield multiple times to try to see out of a four inch in diameter hole. (We were not aware that the defroster did not work or we would have made other travel arrangements.)

Finally it was Christmas day! We had a beautiful white Christmas with about twelve inches of snow that had blown and drifted everywhere. We were officially snowed in, but we did not care. We did not have anywhere to go. It was a wonderful Christmas morning with lots of laughs, pictures and memories. About an hour after lunch, I started to get a killer headache. I took some pain medicine and went to take a nap thinking that this would help relieve the headache. I woke up a couple of hours later with the headache worse than before. This time I was starting to feel nauseous. By around 5 PM, my fifteen-year-old son was also feeling nauseous with a headache. I will spare you the explicit details of what followed, but let’s just say that by 11 PM, my son and I were worse and becoming quite dehydrated. At this point my husband decided to go shovel the eighteen inches of snow drifts out of the driveway and try to take us to the emergency room of our local hospital. He managed to get enough snow out of the way so we could make it out into the street. This was great except the city had not plowed our cul-de-sac so it was not much better than the driveway. As we were pulling out of the driveway, one of our neighbors came home and got stuck in the middle of the street so we could not get out. My husband had to get out and help shovel him out and get him in his driveway before we could finally leave. All this time my son and I are sitting in the van hoping we will make the drive to the ER without another “episode”. We finally arrived at the ER and got some fluids and medication…such a relief. The verdict? We must have had some sort of sensitivity or allergy to a preservative that was in the sausage we had for lunch. No one else got sick, not even one symptom. I am guessing that my son and I will be avoiding that preservative from now on!

I hope that your Christmas was more relaxing than mine. Mine was memorable to say the least! I guess I just wanted to point out that even in times like these we can find something to be thankful for. I am thankful for urgent care and hospital emergency rooms that are staffed 24/7. I am thankful that I have a home with rooms and that I have furniture to move. I am thankful that we have a driveway that we have to shovel. I am thankful for a reliable vehicle even if the defroster is compromised. Most of all I am thankful for the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and His constant blessing and protection for my family.

Cherri