Virginia Holiday Season 0-2

My family moved to Virginia in the summer of 2023. For the first time in 5 years, we were on the same coast as both of mine and my husband's families and, even better, for the first time in 14 years I was in the same state as my twin sister!

I have four kids (17, 10, 8, 4) and my sister has 3 (6, 4, 2) so not only were we excited to be finally close to each other, but we were so thankful that our kids would be able to grow up together as well.

And by the way, when I say we were finally close to each other, my husband and I bought a house 4 houses down from my sister and her husband. He was so thrilled.

Last year's holiday season was...not the best. We had so many expectations for how Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years were going to go and absolutely none of it worked out.

Halloween was hot and sweaty. I got sick on Thanksgiving with a stomach bug leaving my sister to do all of the cooking and no one ate together. Since we had Thanksgiving at my sister's house, we were going to do Christmas breakfast at my house after the kids all opened their presents, but we didn't factor in that my sister's kids are up at the crack of dawn every.single.day. while mine sleep in, so by the time we started cooking breakfast at my house, her kids had been up for 4-5 hours and were starving. It was a sh*t show.

And apparently my immune system was non-existent last year because the day after Christmas I got sick, again, so bad that I couldn't leave the bedroom and missed our friends from New Jersey coming down to visit for Christmas and New Years.

The 2023 holiday season was such a dumpster fire that I commemorated it with an ornament of a toy dumpster with flames on top that lit up, wrote '2023 Holidays' and bought one for myself and one for my sister as a joke.

Surely the 2024 holiday season would be different.

Wrong.

Halloween kicked off with our 4-year-old getting sick with a fever, so I stayed home with her while my husband took the kids to the trunk-or-treat the weekend before Halloween. She was thankfully feeling better enough to trick or treat on Halloween, but she missed the fire trucks at the trunk-or-treat (which she is obsessed with) and didn't get to show off her Halloween costume of being a fire truck.

We learned from last year about which house to have which holiday in. Since we would be doing Christmas Eve dinner and breakfast at my sister's house, I hosted Thanksgiving dinner at my house. Everything was going well, appetizers were out, turkey was in, and my husband had gone to the store to get a couple last minute things I forgot. I didn't even pay any attention to how long he'd been gone.

Then my 17-year-old comes upstairs holding his cell phone and said that Grammy, my MIL, had just called him because I didn't answer asking where daddy was because a neighbor had called her and said they saw him on the side of the road bleeding.

I ran around looking for my phone, grabbed my keys, and ran out of the house as I called my MIL. She wasn't sure what had happened, just knew that her neighbor's daughter said they saw my husband on the side of the road going towards her house and he was bleeding. I sped down the road and slowed down next to my sister, who was in her van ready to come down to my house, yelled that something happened to my husband, and I sped off.

I got to the main drive of the neighborhood and, too upset to think, looked left towards the entrance of our neighborhood, and saw a police truck blocking traffic on the main road outside our development and making people turn around. I thought, that's where he is, and went that way.

When I got to the front of the neighborhood I pulled over and realized it was just one police truck turning people around and didn't see my husband's car or anything else. Then I remembered my MIL said it was closer to her house, so I turned around and drove back down the road and saw the firetruck, the ambulance, police cruisers, and my husband's car off to the side of the road.

I pulled over and jumped out asking what the hell happened? My husband was in the back of the ambulance being treated. He was on his way to his mother's house to say Happy Thanksgiving and was assaulted by two men who were driving motorcycles. (This is a story for another post as the two men were found and are being charged with assault and battery, but the case is still technically open). The paramedics treated my husband, cleaned him up, and he was able to come home.

While we were there dealing with the police, my son called to tell me the power was out at our house, and apparently the entire neighborhood. The police truck at the front of our neighborhood was apparently redirecting traffic due to a powerline fire that happened outside our neighborhood.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Fast forward 3-weeks to Christmas. The week before Christmas break, we got hit, hard, by a stomach bug. My 4-yo started it off Monday with puking at daycare at 9:30am, so I ran to pick her up and bring her home. She puked allllllll day, finally stopping around 4pm. Thank goodness.

Tuesday, I worked from home and stayed home with her, but she was back to her normal self, which was a relief. Tuesday night, I start throwing up.

I slept on the couch to stay away from my husband and because I knew I'd be using the bathroom frequently. Around 2am (Wednesday morning), my 10-year-old came downstairs, grabbed the bucket from under the sink and took the other couch. He started puking within 10 minutes.

Later that day, both my oldest and my husband called at different times saying they didn't feel well. My oldest was picked up by my sister and brought home by noon, which is when he started puking and my husband took an early bus to come home but, he didn't make it home before getting sick. He didn't have a puke bucket...but he did have his lunch box.

Thankfully, this particular stomach bug lasted only half a day. We didn't really have any appetite following that, but the getting sick only lasted several hours. So, when my 8-year-old, Scarlett, started complaining her stomach hurt Thursday night, I figured it was her turn.

It was not her turn.

After 5 days of straight abdominal pain with no vomiting, no diarrhea, no ability to eat or drink without severe pain, I took her to the ER. Two different ER visits within 12 hours of each other, liver enzymes that went from slightly elevated in the first ER visit (numbers in the 100s when normal range is in the 30s), to spiking in the 500-700s in the second ER visit. The second ER visit led to being transported to a children's hospital for further tests.

We were in the hospital for four days. Her levels started coming down and after multiple scans and tests showed all of her other organs to be good, it was determined that she had viral hepatitis. Essentially, the virus we all had settled in her liver, enflaming it, and causing her pain and inability to eat. We went home with 5 days until Christmas.

On Christmas Day, her pain came back. After another 5 days, we went back to the ER and her enzyme levels were back up and so, we were admitted again.

Long story short, they have no idea what is going on with her and we need to follow up with a GI specialist. She's on a super plain diet, gluten and dairy free as much as possible, and monitoring her pain.

We were discharged New Year's Eve, and she was able to ring in the new year with her family. We are still meeting with a GI specialist to make sure she's okay and, while she still has some pain, she seems to be slowly but surely getting better.

Every year has its ups and downs. For whatever reason, 2024 just waited until the last 7 weeks of the year to hit our household with all the downs. I'm so thankful though, that we are finally by family to help with those lows, instead of being 3,000 miles