Christmas and Sick Children

Here's a tentative entry. I've never really accustomed myself to this whole blogging thing. Yet my university professors expect me to excel at it, so I may as well start doing it for real instead of under grade-duress for a class. At any rate, I figure I've already got a perfectly good blog right now, and I may as well add stuff to it every once in a while, just in case someone, someday may actually read it.

Anyway, here goes: Life is going well right now! I just got back from a lovely Christmas weekend at my sister's new place in Vegas. It's a cute little house, on a block next to several dozen other houses that all look very similar to one another. Her kids are so cute! And it was great to see all the nieces and nephews. I really love children--especially MY nieces and nephews. I want kids of my own someday. Someday LONG in the future. More on that later.

At any rate, everyone got sick. Now, in a household filled to bursting with twelve children under the age of ten, this is sort of a given. This fact was clarified for me somewhat when I witnessed some very blatant germ-spread. There was a portion of the room we were trying to keep the other kids away, where two sick little girls (Joy and Audrey) had been hanging out. Anna, who is about 14 months old, toddled over to me (as I was sitting in said area, with sick baby Joy in my arms) with some small unidentified object in her mouth. She spat it out onto the floor, bent down and picked it up, and promptly stuck it into her mouth again. Now, after the strict Germ-X/Purell policy had been established, watching this seemed doubly serious. It made me wonder how little children with habits like those survive for so long. And then I realized . . . this is just part of life. Little kids get sick. Period. End of story. The not-quite-so-easy-to-handle truth that accompanies that is that the grown-ups get sick right along with them. But even that part is okay, I thought as I cuddled the suddenly docile Joy, because these kids are worth it.

Even after a weekend of throwing up and nursing other violently sick people to health, I still want kids. That, in itself, is a miracle. It was a wonderful Christmas, and even without the snow, it was still CHRISTMAS.

Love you all (even though I'm honestly not sure who 'all' is, or if there ever will be an 'all'),

Mary-Celeste