SickMas

Tuesday, 25 December 2012

Well…Xmas started off pretty good this morning. The kids opened their gifts, and Jennifer and I each got a gift from Owen (scarf and hot chocolate mix for mama, Star Trek glasses for me). Owen ran around the house looking for clues to uncover the Wii, which was ultimately hiding in the coat closet in the foyer.

No sooner did we rip open all the packaging, however, than we noticed Isla was sick. Jennifer took her temperature, and got a reading of 102 (relax, it was Fahrenheit, not Celcius). So, Jennifer volunteered to stay home wiht Isla.

I felt really bad about this, and even offered to stay home instead, but Jennifer pointed out that Isla would probably want to nurse a few times. And I left Thanksgiving early when Isla was sick for that holiday.

So I showed up at Jennifer’s family’s holiday party – I brought the food Jennifer prepared, and I added the wrapped gifts to the appropriate piles for the dice game.

During the dice game, I decided I would keep two or three gifts unopened and just bring them home to Jennifer so she could have the fun of unwrapping something totally unexpected. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very lucky, and only scored three games during the regular play. For the second phase, I was able to steal two more gifts and no one stole any of mine, so I was left with five gifts. I unwrapped three of them, and decided to keep the other two to bring home.

Here’s a funny thing: After a few people had left, Jennifer’s aunt wondered aloud what happened to the purple scarf she had wrapped up. The green scarf went to one of her niece’s, but she didn’t know who got the other one. She even called her other niece (who had just left) to see if she got it. I thought maybe one of my unopened gifts were the scarf, but she said no, those weren’t from her.

Once Owen and I got home, we discovered Owen had scored the scarf. I hadn’t realized this because I won a can of poppycock and, when Owen brought over his gifts to me, I saw he had won a can of the same stuff. Wrong. While my can was, indeed filled with poppycock, Owen’s had the scarf in it. So, if any one in the family is reading this…Owen got the scarf.

Jennifer got to open her two mystery gifts this evening. One gift was a box of Starburst candies, and the other was a wrought iron star with a hook hanging below it (for hanging a coat, or something). Jennifer said it would be good for the mud room. So, her two mystery gifts turned out to be successes. Both her aunt and her grandma, feeling bad that Jennifer wasn’t there to party with the rst of us, also gave Jennifer a couple of gifts, so she got some other stuff, too. 

If you want to read something super funny, it turns out Jennifer’s not the only one who had a lousy Xmas.