What a crazy Thanksgiving weekend it was. It started on Tuesday night, we had Gregg's family over for dinner. Gregg's cousin, Amanda is going to school at Truman. She is from NY so she came to St. Louis to share Thanksgiving with her family in Missouri. We ordered some good old NY style pizza so all of the New Yorkers would feel more at home. We all had a good time, especially Sam, he loves playing with his cousins!
Than early Wednesday morning Sam woke up with croup (the famous seal bark cough). He came down with this several times last winter and spring but the summer had given us a welcome break. I knew the routine from his previous episodes, we took him to the Dr. and he prescribed him steroids. This did the trick every time last year. Unfortunately, I had to work on Wednesday so it took a little maneuvering of our schedules to work in that Dr. appointment but we figured it out.
We had already packed our bags on Tuesday night and were ready to take off to Marshall for Thanksgiving. After running by Walgreens to pick up Sam's steroid prescription we took off to my parents as planned.
Sam did feel better by Thanksgiving day but still had a pretty nasty sounding cough. Unfortunately, we found out that the reaction Sam has to the steroids is much more intense this year now that he is more mobile and closer to the age of 2. I fully blame his new personality on the steroids but he turned into a crazy child: he ran wild, screaming, hitting, biting, taking my cousins kids toys, not sleeping well, climbing on anything and everything. I think my Mom actually needed a break from Sam after this trip- she would never say it but I am pretty sure she rested well after we left.
On top of Sam's illness, I came down with the stomach flu on Saturday. Not a very pleasant end to the weekend. I thought I was the only one cursed by it but I talked to my sister (who had left on Friday to her fiance's family) and she had the exact same symptoms hit her on Saturday. We were the only lucky ones- I hope, I sure don't want to wish that on anyone else.
We also came home with a broken camera. I guess the camera had taken too many falls in a home with a toddler. This camera has taken lots of abuse from Sam taking off with it but a simple fall off of an end table was the last straw, I guess. Thanks to this fall we do not have any pictures to document the weekend- oh well a bunch of pictures of us being sick wouldn't be too exciting, huh? Instead I just posted one of my favorites from earlier in the football season (you all see what a good sport I am, I didn't even bring up our loss- actually I has too sick to sulk too much over the game).
Despite all of our illnesses, craziness, and lack of sleep, we did have a great Thanksgiving weekend. We got to see my entire immediate family, unfortunately not all at the same time but everyone did make it to Mom and Dad's at some point during the weekend. It is great we are still able to get together now that we are all having to juggle making it to both sides of the families. We also made it to my Aunt and Uncle's houses on both sides of the family. Sam has so many cousins to play with this year- he is no longer the baby in the family.
Gregg and I often say how thankful we are to have such a loving and fun family. That is what we are most thankful this year. It is easy to get caught up in what we don't have and what we wish we had but Gregg and I continue to remind of ourselves of how lucky we are to have everything that we do have.
