The Christmas season will always be special to me for a number of reasons. There is the music and being able to walk through neighborhoods where people may have been closed off before but are now inviting families to come and see the lights and decorations. The multitude of trees brightly lit nearly everywhere you go and the abundance of cookies and pies and coffee all around. Among those reasons is the birth of my son. My wife and I had already experienced the excitement of waiting for the moment we’d get to meet our daughter for the first time just over a year ago in September of 2010, and yet in 2011 we found ourselves in the same situation; restless because our son was due in the first couple weeks of 2012.
When her water broke in the early hours of Christmas Eve it was pretty unexpected to us. Our daughter somehow knew as she had just woken us. After checking on her and returning to bed, my wife took a late night restroom break and in that moment my son decided he was ready. When she came out of the restroom, she told me her water broke. I immediately jumped out of bed thinking we were going to be rushing out and grabbed the phone to call and have a sitter for our daughter. Nope. First my wife needed a shower. And to pick an outfit. Then do her hair and makeup. Because she was not going to the hospital without getting ready. So after what felt like eternity, we made it to the hospital and got checked in and all that madness.
When the nurse arrived to draw her blood, we were pleasantly surprised to see a cousin of mine. After the initial hellos and handshakes, he strangely asked what we were doing at the hospital, as if it weren’t obvious. We pointed out that the baby in her stomach was ready to come out and he was doing the preliminary blood draw. Strange. In any case, fast forward a few hours after the screams and shrieks to Christmas eve morning and I’m holding my second born as the nurses are cleaning and giving him the once over, you know, to make sure he’s working properly. Staring down at him lying there in the little bed under the heat lamp; watching him make all the movements I had felt for months through my wife’s belly and counting his fingers and toes and not being able to look away because I learned the newborn moments are gone all too quickly. Christmas had indeed come early and he was perfect.
We spent the next couple days holed up in the hospital and watched every Christmas movie ever made, twice. We wound up bringing our daughter to the hospital along with the gifts so that she could meet her new brother, who she instantly loved, and open her presents. This was not the way we had planned to spend Christmas, but I would never trade it for anything. Oh how time flies. Here we are four years later and I’m wondering how we got here in the first place. I don’t remember every detail, but seeing the growth and watching all of these phases and milestones in my children’s lives is the greatest gift I could ask for.
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