So, one last quick post for this year... as promised, I just wanted to share some of our photos from Christmas. As it turns out, it seems I took hardly any pictures. I was terribly ill both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. While I usually have a few hours each day where I can get around and take care of basic needs, about one or two days a week I am completely laid up. It just happened to fall on Christmas this year.
It could have been worse - I remember our first Christmas just a few months after we were married. We had just found out a couple of days earlier that I was pregnant, when I started bleeding on Christmas Eve. When I started having horrible cramping on Christmas Day in the evening, we called my OB's answering service and they told us to go to the ER (duh - we had no clue there's nothing they could do for us). We sat in a cold ER waiting room for hours, where all the chairs were set up theater-style to face the television screens, which were blaring the "Jerry Springer Show", so we chose to sit in a windowsill off to the side instead. People who kept coming in after us were called back before us because it was more serious - one guy still had a knife stuck in him! I think it was from a family gathering of all things. We finally got called back, just to be told they could do nothing to stop a miscarriage. It was a very bizarre experience, especially for me who had only been in the US for a few months and did not even know such television shows existed.