We were supposed to meet all of my extended family at Aunt Jan’s house at 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve to have finger foods and open gifts before our church’s Christmas Eve Christ, Candles, and Communion service. The day had actually gone pretty well and I had cooked the food for the afternoon, bathed the kids, started preparing to get everyone ready to leave. This is where my breakdown began. I had intended for Paige to wear her beautiful smocked, allbeit white Christmas dress with her red tights, and black dress shoes. When I began searching for the dress to put it on her, I found that it wasn’t hanging in her closet as it should have been but it was wadded up in an overnight bag that she had stuffed into her closet instead of unpacking. I wasn’t happy with her, but would only have to run the iron over it and that shouldn’t take too long. Wrong. As I heated the iron and set the ironing board up, I noticed several dirty spots on the (did I mention it’s) white dress! And each of those spots was in a very visible spot on the dress. This is where my fury kicked in. I was so mad! Knowing there was no washing, drying, and ironing the dress in time, we had to search for another outfit for Paige. Mind you this is all at about 2:30 and I’ve done nothing to my hair, I’m not dressed, and I have no makeup on yet. The dress fiasco ended up taking up about 30 minutes. Thankfully Ryan was easy to dress and Stephen was already done.
Unfortunately, my stress didn’t end there. I had asked Stephen to separate the presents that we needed to take that night. Not thinking that would be a big deal, I left him alone to do that and started trying to fix my hair and get dressed. Within moments, he had separated every single present that was under our tree and had them in piles around the living room. While I realize now that he was just trying to make it easier in the long run for us, at that moment it put me under. I lost it. I couldn’t control my crying and the stress in my shoulders felt like I had a baseball under my skin on each shoulder.
At this time, I knew being there at 3:00 simply wasn’t going to happen. So I did what any self respecting nearly 30 year old woman would do…I called my mom crying. She offered to come get the kids from us and go ahead and take them to Aunt Jan’s and I could have some quiet time and time alone to get myself ready. I took my time and got myself together in about 30 minutes. We go to Aunt Jan’s at about 3:40. And it was fine from there on out.
For our extended family this year we decided to only buy presents for the great-grandkids. We started drawing names several years ago with the adults, but in the past years we had basically just been exchanging gift cards…and while that ok, it was just getting impersonal and we’d rather give that money we would’ve spent on gift cards to our favorite charities. Our family chose Arkansas Children’s Hospital because of the involvement we personally had with them in the past few months with Paige. Additionally, our ongoing “charity” is Stephen’s football team. We love those boys and we provide food, groceries, sweats, etc whenever they need them.
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