DorrieDorrie

Christmas6

Since Dorrie was born, holidays or other dates of significance are incredibly fraught. Day to day, there is a constant underlying worry that she’s going to get sick, that she’s going to end up in the hospital. But when a holiday is coming up, that feeling becomes magnified: what if she gets sick on her birthday, or Thanksgiving, or Christmas. And so all of the days leading up to the dread date become filled with this extra level of stress.

Happily, Dorrie did not get sick for Christmas, but we still have New Year’s this week to contend with before any relaxation can occur.

Our plan for Christmas was for Dorrie to visit my mother’s house. Though she lives a mere hour away, and she visits us nearly every Friday, we have managed very few visits to her. Since Dorrie was born, I’ve been there three times, Dorrie once, and Bob once. Our schedule at present just really does not permit a lot of outings.

We waffled on how the visit would occur: should we try to go over Thursday evening and spend the night? Or should we visit only on Friday? Complicating matters was Dorrie’s newly declared preference to sleep from 2am – noon. No doubt genetic (that’d be my preferred schedule too, if I could swing it), it’s proving extremely difficult to inch her back to an earlier wake-up time. Travel on Thursday night thus had at least that much going for it, but little else — spending the night would require transporting extra equipment that we don’t need for a day visit. In spite of the transport problem, we were leaning toward Thursday until we chickened out at the last minute. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to be away from our supply base. Maybe in a few more months we’ll be ready to try it.

Dorrie slept until about 11:45. We started trying to move things out to the car as much in advance as possible, but quite a lot of the stuff needed to be moved at the last minute. This was also our first outing with the new car seat we purchased back in October — the first time Dorrie was carried out of the house not already installed in her seat. She’s relatively easy to carry, but she’s not able to help get herself into a seat so it can be difficult to get her arranged, especially at an awkward angle. In the end, it took us an hour to get ourselves packed up and on the road.

The new car seat means dad and mom can finally share the driving duties (the other seats were in the center of the back leaving space enough only for mom to squeeze in with the vent and oxygen) so daddy got to ride with Dorrie in the back. The ride was uneventful and getting into Grammy’s house was not quite as tricky as getting out of ours. Dorrie was pretty nervous; she hasn’t left the house in months and when she has, it’s always been to the doctor’s where unpleasant things happen. But Grammy was there, and no one tried to stab her, so she calmed down, especially after we put her in her chair.

[At the dinner table]

Because we got there so late (it was 2pm by that time) we ate almost immediately upon arrival. Dorrie sat with everyone at the table and got her own much delayed lunch (via tube). The food was good, and it was a much more typical Christmas dinner than we had last year. (Right down to Uncle J1 racing out to the living room every 3 minutes to check on the Celtics and Uncle J2 texting under the table). After dinner we all went back out to the living room so Dorrie could open her presents.

[Obligatory Elmo]

[One of the middle presents]

Dorrie got lots of neat stuff and so did we (wii). She got a bit overwhelmed after a while and stopped really paying a lot of attention to the toys that were appearing, but she played with a couple of them and seemed to be enjoying herself.

[A little overstimulated]

[This wasn't a toy]

Eventually, everyone else left to go to the movies and we were left to finish packing up Dorrie and her stuff to get going home. Unfortunately, the return to her car seat caused enough stomach squishing, burping and coughing that Dorrie threw up her last meal of the day and so we left a gross gift for Grammy slung over the railing of her front porch. (Dorrie had given grammy laundry detergent for Christmas.)

Dorrie did her usual fall asleep at the last minute trick in the car, leading to a 20 minute nap for the day. By the time we got home, got everything into the house and gave her her bath, she was wiped. She fell asleep before 11pm, the earliest she’d slept since probably October! A real Christmas Miracle.

[... which lasted until 3:30am when she suddenly had to poop and woke up again for an hour and a half. But it technically wasn't Christmas any more at that point.]

[A new hat]

[Hentai Hello Kitty]

Posted by mom, under moving forward... or not, our little witch