Memories

Six years ago, on Christmas Eve, I was sitting at my parent's house with my whole family. After eating, I got an upset stomach. At the time, I thought it was the pizza, I always got an upset stomach with pizza from a certain place. Husband and I left my parents house around 11 pm. It was the last time we did a Christmas Eve gathering which lasted so long (now we meet for a few house the weekend before Christmas). We headed straight for our church where we attended midnight Mass. After mass, we headed home for a peaceful night's sleep.

On Christmas morning, I awoke to my water breaking. In a fog, I stumbled to the bathroom, cleaned myself up and headed back to bed. About a 1/2 hour later, it dawned on me what actually happened. After I was finally able to rouse Husband, he took his sweet time taking a shower and grabbing our things. I still hadn't started having contractions, but we headed to the hospital anyway (we didn't know!). After getting there and checked in, my contractions finally started. At this point, we called our families to inform them we would not be coming to visit. Around 3 pm, one of the nurses mentioned to Husband that the hospital was offering free Christmas lunches. Husband, who apparently felt he was starving, snuck out when our favorite nurse was in the room to grab a bite to eat. Only he didn't eat and come back. He brought the food back to the room to be with me. I think it was the only time I ever kicked him out of the room! (To be fair, I had just entered a transition phase and for the first time, was highly uncomfortable) When he came back into the room, the smell of turkey and cranberry sauce swirling around him, we found out it was time to start pushing the baby out. 45 minutes later, Einey was born.

Einey's birth and the moments leading up to it are forever stuck in my mind, just like the events leading up to her sister's births. I was not ready for her to be born, there were so many decisions we had yet to make. She was 4 weeks early so we had no last minute time to prepare. In fact, I had visited my OB the day before she was born and he felt was still had at least two weeks. Apparently the upset stomach I had was in fact early labor. I didn't know, it wasn't intense like I heard it would be. I was always told when you went into labor, you'd know. In fact with all three of my girls, I didn't know. After we had Einey, everyone who saw us the night before commented on "I knew you'd have her soon, I could see how uncomfortable you were".

So here I am, on Christmas Eve, thinking of that Christmas Eve six years ago that would forever change our lives. We still do most of the same traditions, we've just modified them to fit our family's need.

Merry Christmas!