Christmas 2023

 We last left off on Christmas Eve.  Christmas day was quiet, but nice.  We began the day bright and early at 6:30am, as the girls indicated that this was the latest acceptable time.  We started with stocking and Santa gifts.  The girls had asked Santa for a gumball machine that you build and take apart to build again differently, think marble track but with gumballs.  They got that and Elsie got the Barbie she asked for and CC got a light up drawing tablet.  Merrick, who was too cool to ask Santa for anything, got AirPods.  Jeremy and I got a pickle ball set.

Merrick's gift highlights were, not surprisingly, all about sports.  He got an elbow guard, face mask, eye black, and, most importantly, a new bat.  Starting next year, he will have to swing a BBCor bat so he got a brand new one to start off his high school career on the right foot.

Carrigan got lots of crafting and volleyball related things.  The highlights were the sewing machine from Grandpa and Lollie, and a new volleyball net for the backyard.

Elsie got Barbies galore, a Cookez Makery that has you bake a dough in a magic oven and it magically turns into a stuffy, and a magical fairy finder.  Her biggest gifts were roller skates from Grandpa and Lollie, and a new bike.

Jeremy and I struggled with what to get each other this year.  I'm not sure he was over the moon with his gifts of shoes, jeans, a reading light, a hat and snacks from around the world, but I did put a fair amount of thought into it and, as they say, it's the thought that counts.

I picked out several of my gifts this year, but Jeremy did surprise me with some new clothes.  I got clothes, boots, and my highlight was an eye massager.

After opening all the gifts, it looked like a bomb had gone off in the house, but everyone was happy.  We had a nice breakfast with cinnamon roll and, a delightful gift to me, I didn't even have to make them since we had friends drop them off the night before.

The rest of the day was about R and R.  Jeremy and I took a nap.  We watched movies, did face masks, and everyone tried out my new eye massager.  It was a great day.

Today is NYE and we are trying again with the Lundberg Christmas party.  Unfortunately, now Becca's boys, Quincy and Lincoln, have Covid, but we can't postpone any longer.  Maybe someday everyone will be healthy, but that might not happen until next Christmas.

Speed Christmas

This Christmas has been a strange one.  It has certainly not gone as planned, but rather, has been celebrated in random bursts.  It started the day after Thanksgiving, with the girls in an extreme hurry to start celebrating.  Couple that with the my desire to make sure that we got everything in this season despite Merrick's surgery and you have a recipe that had us doing lots of celebrating prior to December even starting.

Fast forward to this last week. With Merrick's surgery in the rearview mirror and with school out for the holidays, I had intended on spending this past week doing all things Christmas.  Turns out that was not how things would play out.  Instead, I tested positive for Covid on Monday morning and spent the week quarantined in the basement.  Truth be told, I'm not really sure what went on upstairs while I was in the basement, but I do know it involved a lot of TV and not much of the festivities I had planned.  While in the basement, I did at least get all my wrapping done, and even had enough extra time to DIY bows for each present.

Friday, I emerged from the basement and we hit the ground running.  Friday we spend most of the day baking.  We made tons of sugar cookies, peppermint cookies, and homemade Reese's.  That evening we packaged and delivered goodies.

Yesterday, we continued to pack in all fun we could stand.  We made Christmas ornaments.  We made and decorated gingerbread houses. We finished our goody deliveries.  We capped off the night with a drive to see Christmas lights and arrived home to find a letter for the girls from Santa.

Today is Christmas Eve and we are supposed to be getting together with all my family, but we hit the breaks instead as my niece, Isabel, and both of my parents tested positive for Covid yesterday.  In true Strange Christmas fashion, we have put a pin in our celebrations and will have pretend Christmas on New Year's Eve.  We will then have Clifford Family cousin Christmas in late January, when we go to AZ for a basketball tournament.

It's certainly not the Christmas we planned, but I think it will definitely be one to remember.

Christmas Hurdles

 Am I the only one who thinks about life as a series of hurdles? Leading up to any major event, I tend to think of all the things that have to happen before the event as hurdles.  These aren't always necessarily bad things, just things that have to happen.  Starting tomorrow I am on Winter Break from my job.  One of the hurdles that I had to cross before that was my very first big girl business trip.  I sent the majority of the week in Grand Rapids, Michigan for corporate training and a Christmas party.  It was a very strange experience traveling on my own (something I haven't done since before Jeremy and I were married) and staying in a hotel room by myself.  Overall, it was an enjoyable time, but I was happy to get home Friday night.

Now that I'm home, it's on to hurdles (mostly fun) before Christmas.  The first one of those was the girls night that C.C. has been planning for weeks.  Last night we had 7 girls between the ages of 5 and 11 here for crafting, pizza, a Christmas movie, ice cream sundaes, jumping on the trampoline, hide and seek and a snowball fight.  It was a fun and crazy night.

This weekend we crossed one more hurdle.  Merrick played in his first post-surgery basketball tournament.  While he was still sore, he decided to give it a try.  The first day went well and he was running harder and feeling better than he has in months.  He had thought previously in the season that he was out of shape and didn't realized that his heart was holding him back.  Today, he was a little extra sore going into the games, but he played well and played hard.  He had one scary moment in the second game today where he got kneed in his wounds.  He was ok though... and eventually my mom heart recovered too.

This coming week will be filled with fun, amazing hurdles.  I can't wait. 

Merrick's Surgery

This week, time was kept by relation to Merrick's surgery, which took place on Friday.  From about Wednesday on, we talked and thought about little else.  Thursday, we had a quiet night at home as a family and we headed to bed hopeful that we would get some sleep before our very early wake up call the next morning (we had to leave for the hospital at 5:45).  If it gives you a sense of how we all slept, both Merrick and I were up and completely ready to go before our alarm even went off.

Our check in time at the hospital was 6:30 and we spent from then until about 8:15 meeting and talking with all the doctors and nurses.  We had multiple nurses, two cardiologists, and an anesthesiologist.  They each came and talked to us and explained different parts of the process.  Merrick was a trooper, expect he wasn't pleased that the nurse messed up his IV and had to start over at a different site and while she was doing that the doctor in the room was giving all the worst case scenarios.  That was definitely not his favorite part of the day.

At about 8:15, they had Jeremy and I go to the waiting room and took Merrick back to the OR.  I think Merrick was planning on going to sleep pretty quickly, but it didn't really work out that way.  They kept him awake for quite some time so they could get a baseline on his PVCs.  He was having some PVCs at that point, but they wanted to see more so they gave him a medicine to speed up his heart rate.  He started feeling a fair bit of anxiety at that point.  They joked that they could put on a horror movie to get his heart rate up and he answered back that he was already in a horror movie.  Eventually, they felt like they got what they needed and they put him under.

While he was under, his PVCs continued and they did what's called "pace mapping" of his heart.  They found what they believed to be the spot where the PVCs were originating and they cauterized it.  Over the next hour, they monitored him and did everything they could to try and induce the PVCs to return.  They brought him partially out of sedation, they gave him medicine to speed up his heart rate, and they gave him medication to slow down his heart rate.  Through it all, the PVCs stayed away so they put him back under to remove his catheters and then allowed him to start waking up.

At this point, they brought him into his recovery room and, after we talked with the doctors, we were allowed to join him there.  His waking up period was slow, but uneventful.  He would start to wake up and try to sit up and we would have to force him back down and remind him where he was and two seconds later he would be snoring again.

The next six hours were rough as he had to lay flat and still so as to not open back up the entry spot into his femoral artery.  After the 6 hours SLOWLY passed, he was able to get up and walk to the bathroom and then at that point things moved very quickly.  Within about 15 minutes of him getting up for the first time, we were headed home.

Since then, he has been taking it very easy on the couch.  He has a lot of soreness, but his wounds are healing up nicely.  We have had lots of sweet visitors, bringing him all kinds of treats and gifts and he has been very spoiled.  We are extremely grateful for the outpouring of love and support we have felt leading up to, during, and following his surgery.  We have felt very supported throughout a very difficult time and now feel like a huge weight has been lifted.

Following the procedure, he hasn't felt a single PVC.  In two weeks he will have a heart monitor that he will wear for another two weeks and then we will follow up with the cardiologist in February.  We are very hopeful at this point that we are at the end of this very stressful road and that makes us all smiles.

A Cultural Experience

 What a busy week, as always.  This week I spent much of my free time early in the week preparing for a cultural night I was in charge of that we were having at our church on Thursday night.  We had presentations from 6 different people that were either from a foreign country or lived there for a period of time.  They talked about the culture, traditions, food, etc.  We learned about Brazil, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, India, Spain, and Samoa.  It was such a great night!

This weekend, the weather has been really crummy, with lots of rain and high winds at time.  For the most part we have chosen to stay inside.  We started the weekend with our traditional family movie night, but this week it was Christmas edition and we let the kids open their Christmas pjs.  Merrick was supposed to have a matching shirt with the girls, but we discovered when opening them, that they sent us the wrong thing for him.  We made due for the night and I took him to the store the next day to replace it, but unfortunately they were out.  He ended up with a shirt he likes better, so while he won't match the girls, he was happy.

Also this weekend, I took the girls to get gingerbread craft kits from Home Depot.  We brought them home so Merrick could build one too and they had a good time putting them together.  Merrick enjoyed the hammering part but tapped out at the decorating.   The girls, on the other hand, were all in for the decorating.

We still have a number of things on our Christmas Bucket List, but we will have to put a pin in that for a bit as this week (Friday) is Merrick's surgery.  I will be back next week with an update on that and in the meantime, we welcome all prayers and positive thoughts.