SoSC December 2, 2017 – Thanksgiving

Posted on by 32 comments

Linda G Hill’s Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “cramp.” 

Thanksgiving 2017 had come and gone. This is a little recap of the detail. It has something to do with decorating the Christmas tree. I’ll get to it toward the end of the post.

I was hosting the Thanksgiving dinner this year. The previous time I hosted it was in 2009. That was the year I received the chemotherapy and radiation for my melanoma cancer from January to July. I know, I was so brave to host the dinner for 28 people four months after the cancer treatment. With the limited energy, I took two months to get the house ready, cleaning the house one room at a time. On the day of Thanksgiving, my daughter Mercy helped me do most of the cooking, I had written the schedule of the day from 8:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. when the family would arrive. She followed the schedule to put the turkey in the over, cook other dishes and set up the hors d’oeuvre and dessert tables. She did such a good job that all I did was get myself ready for the family dinner.

Well, for this year, I couldn’t plan too far in advance. I went to Portland, Oregon on two different trips when Mercy gave birth to her first baby. I went on the first trip in mid-September by myself when Mercy was due. Her baby was overdue, and I had to come back to California to take care of my After-school Care business.

My husband went with me on the second trip scheduled on September 28. The night before the trip, my son-in-law, Will called, and said Mercy was in labored and admitted to the hospital. I prayed every minute from the time he called to the time we arrived Portland the next day afternoon. We took a taxi from the airport straight to the hospital. Mercy was in pain but was not ready to deliver. By 10:00 p.m., Will asked us to go back to the house and will call to give us the update.

We went back to Mercy’s house, but I wasn’t able to sleep. I set the phone to the lowest ringtone because my husband went to sleep. I looked at the phone every five minutes, making sure I didn’t miss a call. By 4:00 a.m., Will called and said Mercy had delivered the baby through C-section. It was too much to coordinate by the time the doctor decided to have C-section, so he didn’t call earlier. After the delivery the doctor said Mercy could have visitors and that was when Will called me. We rushed to the hospital and were so happy to see our first granddaughter.

9

My husband went back to California after a week and I stayed for six weeks. I helped to take care of the cooking, doing laundry and other chores. I took the first “shift” at night to watch Autumn so Mercy and Will could rest a little. Mercy had to feed Autumn every two hours and Will tried to help. Being new parents were quite a learning experience to Mercy and Will. Mercy tried holding Autumn in different positions for feeding but there was a latching problem. Will went back to work after two weeks of paternity leave. He continues to help when Autumn wakes up during the night for feeding.

When I came home a week before Thanksgiving, I rushed to the stores to get fall season decoration. I stopped by many stores, all I saw was Christmas items. So, I had to use Christmas decoration. Why not? Mercy, Will, and Autumn came to spend Thanksgiving with us this year. We had a houseful of family again this year and had a great gathering.

1

Our old, artificial Christmas tree was all worn out, and we bought a new one – white color. Throughout the years when I decorated the Christmas tree, I cramped the tree with several strings of lights, many strands of garlands, and years of collections of ornaments. This year, after I assembled the tree, Mercy helped to decorate it. She only used two strings of lights, one strand of the garland, and twenty ornaments. She liked the simple look. You know what? I like it. I like the peaceful and quiet look of a simple tree.

20171201_202627

By the way, Autumn is two months and four days old. She had her first immunization. Mercy said Autumn handled the shots well. “Good girl, Autumn!”

89188b83

Linda G Hill’s SoSC December 2, 2017

 

tagged with , , , , , ,

32 comments

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.