Chevy Chase

Today pretty much felt like a knock off of a Chevy Chase Christmas movie, without Cousin Eddie or his Arr-Vee at least. ;)

Woke up with a headache that made me sick to my stomach, went back to bed and ended up sleeping until 2 pm.   Washed my hands and found no hot water, Steve couldn't get the hot water heater re-lit, so we had to call a service guy out here.  He did it as a favor basically, and got over here pretty quickly.  Most of our available cash later, it is temporarily fixed, but something new and more permanent is broken on it, so we get to replace our entire hot water heater, for some decent money, a heater which at any point could go out and not be able to be relit while we have lots of company over at the house.

Poor Cathy got sick, so they delayed coming up by a day on a wait and see, and then Mom said that poor Ernie got sick too, so for awhile we thought we'd have a bit of a smaller Christmas gathering.  Then Cathy got to feeling a bit better, so they made the trek up tonight, and made it around 8:30 pm or so.  Ernie's still assessing how he's doing.  What lousy timing for everyone to get sick, and it's a lot of people right now.

I had a couple of errands to run-I needed to go to Glenndale to pick up a box that was there, needed to run to the store to get more applesauce as part of dinner since Kaylee ate it all, wanted to run to Tipton for a drop off, and wanted to run to Books A Million to pick up something there that she'd liked that was inexpensive, since we didn't really get her very many gifts this year.  The parking lot at the mall was packed out into no man's land, but I took the opportunity to jog.  Yep, I jogged inside, grabbed the thing, paid, and jogged back to my car, where I had two people fighting for my spot when I tried to leave.  It's an animal kingdom out there, man!

Right when they got here, Kaylee was putting on her shoes to go run out and help them unload the van, when she braced herself with her hand against the door--which Steve closed, and the door by the hinge closed on Kaylee's little finger.  I was in the kitchen, and she ran screaming past me for her room.  We were concerned that her finger was broken.  She was in some real pain from that one.  So Steve's in with her while I'm letting everyone in the house.  I get her an ice pack, and it's getting late, so we've been getting food and the table ready.  I pull a plate off the top shelf, and someone had put a little glass bowl on top of the plate.  It slid off and hit a tall glass on the counter, sending glass shards and Diet Coke everywhere, the counter, the floor, etc.  So next we got to pick glass shards up and off of everything before sitting down to eat dinner. I'm sure we'll find little pieces of it around for awhile to come.

Kaylee stayed on her floor with her feet elevated for awhile as her finger slowly calmed down under the ice pack, and we were able to move it and see that it wasn't broken, at least.  I could just picture an ER visit tonight too.  The timing though....nine people are coming to your door Right Now, your daughter is screaming in pain in her room, your lasagna isn't cooked through yet, and you're about to get shattered splinters of glass everywhere.  And while you're at it, you hope the eight people spending the night in your house all get a hot shower okay tomorrow.  Somebody ought to make a country song out of that.

From here on out, everything went just fine, other than it's 2:30 a.m. now and I can't sleep because I had to sleep in so late today.  But we had a nice dinner and it was good visiting with everybody.  Richard and Ann have a tradition of giving out gifts the night before, where the kids pick a number then get to go in order of that number and choose available gifts on a table until they're gone.  This year was different, like many other things this year.  :)  They wrapped up an old doll or stuffed animal to give to each of the grandkids, as a memory, and also attached a gift card so the kids could pick out their own jewelry and such this year.  Everyone got a laugh remembering the old dolls that they used to play with at Grandma and Grandpa's house.

Tomorrow will come earlier than a lot of us will be ready for, but hopefully it will go a little more peacefully and smoothly than today did.  We'll have Christmas and a big brunch before the Cherry family has to hit the road and head back south again.   I'm so glad they could make it up though.  Kaylee would have really been sad to miss out on seeing her cousins this year...