our last hoosier christmas eve

we picked weed and mor up at the airport very late on the tuesday night before christmas. morgan arrived with a horrible, itchy, reddish, smelly beard. not nicely trimmed. it basically just confirmed my suspicions that he is grody. they tried to wake up the older kids to say hi, at about 11:30pm, but cw and bw were gone. aw woke up just long enough to be scared out of her mind by the bearded stranger hovering over her bed. and weed looked fantastic! she just has a little bump. something i never experienced. i just looked really round in the middle and kind of gooed over my pants until about eight weeks before the kids were due and then i exploded into huge, midsection thickness from my waist up to my neck. and then there was the double chin. she has none of that. i think that i will have a hard time really comprehending that she is going to have a baby until i hold the baby in my arms. hopefully, he will not be hairy like his father.

mom called four or five times before we even got on the road on the 24th. it was really kind of a wake up call to have weed and mor in the car with us. i had to sit on a bean bag on the floor of the van on the drive to mom's, as there are not enough seats in the car to hold the six of us plus two. sad. we had all anticipated that mom would be weepy when she saw weed and she definitely did not disappoint. meg and jason and the kids surprised us by coming to spend the day and it was really wonderful to be together. i think the last time the four of us girls were together with our families was april. way too long. normally i am a very anti-nap person. but when i have a chance to be with my sisters and my mom i become very open to the idea of mw snoozing the day away in sweet oblivion. he and bw napped for a little over three hours while the rest of us watched children's christmas movies and ate too many thumbprint cookies.

mom received some beautiful flowers late in the afternoon and we all shared a bittersweet moment as we read the card from one of our favorite people in the world. tristan lived next door and went to school with weed. very soon after we moved to the house on winthrop he started making himself at home in our home. we all loved him. when mw came home to meet my family, he met tristan too. i'm not sure when he started spending christmas eve with us, baking cookies and making milkshakes, but the last few years have been quieter without him. after his mother passed away they sold the house next door and he headed for nyc. we haven't seen him much since then, but he is always in our thoughts when christmas rolls around. we always stayed up doing stupid stuff and watching "white christmas," and about three years ago we were standing in mom's kitchen when tristan told us that he had heard that an egg could withstand any amount of pressure that we could exert on it if we held it between our thumb and middle finger. and so we tested his theory. looking back, it was so stupid. he stood there, with the egg in his hand, and all of us hovering around him, and he squeezed the shell as hard as he could. needless to say, the egg broke open into about a million pieces and the guts flew all over the kitchen. it sounds dumb now, but it was hilarious. and so, on christmas eve, i thought of that memory and smiled.

we gathered the kids into the living room and let them open their christmas js. cw was too big this year to wear the same js as the other kids and he was honestly a little sad about it. i bought mw and i matching js and he was a really good sport about it. we didn't get around to watching "white christmas" this year. that tradition has slowly been laid to rest. our kids aren't old enough to appreciate bing and danny k. we headed out around 8pm and carried our beautiful, sleeping children to their beds when we got home. cw had a hard time sleeping. too much pent up anxiety over whether or not santa would bring him a leapster2. mw and i finished wrapping the kids' presents and watched "white christmas." we also became #1 on our pediatrician's hit list. gw's eyes had been gooey and yuck all day and, with mw's support, i called the doctor at 10:30pm on christmas eve. mw reassured me that she knew the job description when she signed up. and she really didn't seem too annoyed. who knows what she said about me to her family when she got off the phone. and frankly, who cares. she called in the antibiotic drops and i headed to walgreens, where i waited in the drive thru line for twenty minutes. i later pondered, who on earth would be willing to take the graveyard shift at the 24 hour walgreens pharmacy on christmas eve? i mean, who does that? i returned home to my beautiful, little tree and four boys and one girl who were peacefully sleeping in their beds. just waiting for santa to bring them all of the things on their lists. and i determined, i wouldn't want to be anywhere on christmas eve but with my little wall family.