It was a different Christmas this year.
Our family hit the road to New York for the weekend to celebrate with family.
Pam and I are grandparents (young ones at that, of course). Pam has an adult son from a previous marriage who lives in New York with his family, including two daughters who are 3 years old and 1 year old, respectively.
We spent three days with them including Christmas Day. It was a lot of fun to see the excitement of the season through these little girls’ sincere faces and innocent reactions.
With our boys now 14 and 13 years old, respectively, Christmas has changed. It’s different now with both teens fully understanding of the season’s magic and meaning. This is all okay because it’s natural. We have tremendous memories of their Christmas days as toddlers and the excitement that came with all the hysteria. I will cherish those memories forever.
It was good for the boys to spend their first Christmas away from home with their little nieces. They got to experience it through their eyes and see many of our family traditions shared with them, such as matching Christmas pajamas magically appearing on the front porch on Christmas Eve. It’s Santa and the reindeer who drop the pajamas from the sleigh high above while making the rounds to other parts of the world. My boys were good sports and played along throughout our silliness.
This was only my second Christmas ever away from home. The first being as a teen about my sons’ ages at Disney World. It was different and special, and I had two takeaways.
First, I enjoy spending Christmas in my own home. Secondly, I forget how exhausting it is to be around young kids and how wonderful the feeling is when they go to sleep for the night.
Every Christmas there’s always some reference to our most memorable Christmas morning.
It was back in 2009 when Beckett was 19 months old and Carson just seven weeks old. Beckett was standing on a Diego potty Santa brought him clapping his hands over doing his business on this new trainer. At some point he started jumping, falling backwards, hitting the corner of a wall with his head. It was a direct hit, splitting open his head with a sizable gash.
Unfortunately, a few seconds after the fall, I turned him so my wife could look at the back of his head and she noticed he was bleeding heavily. A few minutes later, we were on our way to AGH.
This incident marked the second ER visit for Beckett in the last two months. That initial stop was a completely different experience from the one on Christmas. The previous encounter was highly concerning because he was vomiting and suffering from extreme dehydration. We were worried and troubled over his welfare at the time.
The Christmas Day visit was not quite as disturbing. Perhaps it was Beckett’s silly demeanor in the hospital or maybe just the fact it was the second experience.
With this ER experience, there was not as much stress because we knew this was just a minor injury, one that we would later discover needed only two stitches to heal.
It’s simple now after many years to make light of the situation, but there were certainly some uncomfortable moments at the time. It’s always tortuous to witness my kid be manhandled by strangers, even if it’s for his own good. It’s extremely difficult to watch and I do not see myself ever being able to handle that well.
In this case in the ER, Beckett, again a toddler, had to be placed face first on the bed because the cut was on the back of his head. While a burly male nurse pinned him down, the physician stitched him up. Beckett, of course, wailed the entire time, while Pam sang a rendition of “Wheels on the Bus” to try and distract him.
As quickly as this incident happened, my kid was over it. He had no problem putting the incident behind him. So much so that the moment we walked in the door at home he went straight for that Diego potty and tried to get atop it again. That box was soon out of the house.
Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions. I have a handful for my personal priority list, but I came across a funny list of New Year’s resolutions from a mom on the Raising Teens Today website worthy of sharing.
No. 1: Buy a new phone charger and hide it so my kids can’t find it.
No. 2: Donate my son’s coats to kids who will actually wear them.
No. 3: Vow to close my teen’s bedroom door instead of nagging them about the mess.
No. 4: Stop taking their “offishness” so damn personally.
No. 5: Buy a dog so someone is happy to see me when I get home.
No. 6: Buy new forks and spoons and hide them so my kids can’t steal them.
No. 7: Stop making impossible New Year’s resolutions (see No. 4)
No. 8: Stop getting so worked up about the small stuff.
No. 9: Find the humor in it all, ‘cus this won’t last forever.
No. 10: Find ways to let my kids know they’re loved every single day.
Numbers eight and nine are what I will work to improve on. I will enter 2023 with the goals of not sweating everything and laughing more at the silly teenager antics of the house. It’s worth a shot.
