Now we're ready for Christmas..

Cookies baked & frosted? Check!
Presents wrapped and ready? Check!
Christmas cards sent? Check!
Snow on the ground? Check!
At least one of our children sick? Check!!

My memories of my childhood Christmases include more years than not where Christmas Eve found me worshipping the porcelin god rather than laying in bed listening for Santa's reindeer's hooves on the rooftop. Lovely, right? I don't know whether it was the excitement, the peel & eat shrimp with cocktail sauce I over-ate at my Aunt Molly's house or the combination there of -- but Christmas Eve for me as a child generally ended as a "puke fest".

Not unlike my own childhood Christmas memories - since I've "grown up" and created a little family of my own it seems like each year we've had at least one member of the family (usually a kid) sickly. There was the year that I stayed back with a sickly Emma on Christmas Eve while the rest of the family went to church. She laid there limp and barely picked at her presents. There was the year when, expectant with baby Michael, I was totally bed-ridden with HG (hyper-emesis gravidum - that means NON STOP puking. For MONTHS.)

Last year again it was mommy who was most sickly - and I was so out of it that I put the wrong gifts in the wrong stocking. The girls are still debating whether Santa just had too much to drink or whether he is getting dementia in his old age. Seriously.

This year it sounds like our 4 yr. old is going to be the sickly one. She woke up with what sounds like croup this morning, poor baby.

Still -- now I know it's Christmas. It wouldn't be Christmas without the sicky.