Christmases

As with any married couple, holidays always get interesting at who can perform the juggling act best. With Ryan's family and mine combined, we have three sets of families to try and see each holiday. Luckily, my parents and Ryan's dad and stepmom live in the same town, so usually we are able to get that to work out pretty well. Ryan's mom lives on the west side of Washington and her side of the family is a little more spread out - Ryan's grandparents live in Newport, WA which is north of Spokane.

We were unable to celebrate with Ryan's mom this year, but were finally able to celebrate with Ryan's sister and her family as well as Ryan's brother Chris and his family. It was so awesome! It was the first time we have been able to give our nephews (and niece though she was just born!) their gifts in person. On December 20th we drove over to Seattle where his sister Melissa lives and we picked Chris and Amber and Alma up on the way at the SeaTac airport. It was an amazing two days. His sister made us amazing food, and the boys all got to play together and we all got to soak up a cute little baby girl that we rarely get to see. It was bliss! We headed home the next day, bringing Chris, Amber and Alma with us to Odessa.

Ryan and I had lots of running around and errands to do. Not to mention unpacking and getting settled in. Gavin had lots of lost time to make up for with his Grandparents. Though we were all tired it was still so amazing to be home. We had our first doctors appointment with our new OB-Gyn and even though we had some issues with them dealing with our insurance (much much more to come on this in another post) I was happy with our doctor and they were all on the same page to go forward planning on a VBAC delivery.

Our plans were to drive up to Spokane to celebrate Christmas Eve with Ryan's mom side of the family at his Aunt Ev's house. Ryan and I were kind of stressed about it and weren't sure if we were going to be able to make it as we wanted to make sure that both sides of our families had an equal amount of time together. That morning, Ryan, Chris and Jay were working on their well which had been having issues (they had been out of water for two days) when Kathy took her turn for the worst. She passed away that morning around 10 or 11am. For our families privacy, we have been asked not to release the official official determination of death, however it was basically the perfect storm in sense of the flu. She caught a very terrible strain of it and it literally took her life in less than two days. We obviously want to play the what-if game, but have been encouraged that because of how fast it happened, there was no way for anyone to know what was happening inside her body. You usually don't go to the ER for the flu, unless it gets super bad, and it was just getting to that point when all of a sudden that wasn't an option. We miss her terribly and even still it is hard to believe that she is gone.

As this put a tremendous damper on the holidays, we still tried to have as "normal" of a Christmas for our kids as we could. We celebrated Christmas at my parents house and opened all of our gifts to each other. It was weird and awkward, but also so nice to have a tiny taste of normal and an escape from what we were all dealing with. It was fun to watch Gavin open his presents and he got really into it this year. He got all kinds of toys, books, games and clothes. His favorites being the train set he got. He loves himself some Thomas!

The day after Christmas, Kathy's son Walt and his family came down and we "celebrated" our Christmas together and had the kids open their gifts that Kathy had bought them. It was extremely difficult as Kathy was so thoughtful when choosing gifts and just seemed to know exactly what to give everyone. Many tears were shed that day, but many laughs too as she also had a ridiculous sense of humor and with every gift the comment was made, "that was SO Kathy..."