Merry Christmas 2012 Andrew!

Merry Christmas Little Special! This would have been your second Christmas at home with us if you had lived.

We decided that Christmas Day was going to be more just our family and Mark's mom, Jean. But a few weeks ago I realized that a single woman I am friends with at the office has no family in town. So Mark and I extended the invitation for her to join us for the holiday. No pressure. No need to bring presents or anything. Just come and join us. She was so touched by our invitation and appreciative of the gesture.

She normally spends it alone. Last year she tried to find Chinese and was surprised that no place was open. So I insisted then, that she should join our family. We're informal, casual, open a few presents, enjoy the kids' reactions to their various gifts and eat.

So she arrived today and quickly blended in as we enjoyed watching the boys open their few presents. And then I got the delight of handing Emlyn, my friend who joined us, her own Christmas stocking and some presents we had purchased for her. Things I knew she could use and would like. Tea, Epsom salts for the bath, candles in favorite scents, etc. It was so much fun looking for presents to bless her with. And it was even more fun to see her surprise at how much we gave her.

And she, despite my telling her she did not need to bring gifts, gave the boys dinosaurs, Lynn some special rattles and Mark and I a gift card. She even gave my mother-in-law a candle. Emlyn loves candles and my mother-in-law likes them as well.

It was wonderful to open our home and the holiday to her and just meant a lot to us to have her join our family for the day. Too bad Andrew wasn't here to meet her.

He would have been getting into everything most likely.

After cleaning up from a delicious lunch, I challenged Samuel's fleet to a sea battle. And Ryan helped me figure out what positions to look for Samuel's ships. I was about to win when grandma took over the game as Samuel felt called to playing with the new racetrack they had just received and she sank my last battleship just before I could finish sinking her last ship. I turned to Emlyn to comment, "I said I like playing battleship. But that doesn't mean I am good at it."

Then we found the new card game Mark had purchased. We didn't know there was a shorter version so us women played for 2 1/2 hours before Emlyn came out of no where and cleaned out her stock pile. All while I snuggled the little treasure and we talked writing, places... people... stories...life.

And Andrew was with us all in our hearts.

Merry Christmas little special!

And does it hurt today? Christmas only hurt when he was here with us at the NICU and we celebrated as a family somewhere else becuase the NICU did not allow children under age 12 in. That was the only thing that hurt. So, as I said last year, we're used to not having him with us physically in the room on Christmas Day. When going to the Rogers for Mark's side for their celebration and when going to the Falksens on my side. So all of that to say . . . . only in the most small of ways does it hurt.