How Not To Hold A Family Reunion

This is another quickie, still with no pictures, because I didn’t take many.

My kids, Mom, and I spent months pulling together the family reunion that was supposed to happen last week. We got my son, daughter-in-law, and grandson here just as my daughter went into labor with my beautiful granddaughter. Baby is born way early Tuesday morning, with daughter-in-law in attendance because things went too quickly for the rest of us to get there.

We visited the new mom and baby in the hospital, picked up my mom from the airport and made it back to the hospital in time for Great-Grandma to hold the baby. Everything was going well.

Then disaster struck. My husband and I came down with killer stomach flu. My daughter banished us from her house until we were better. We finally made it for my grandson’s 1st birthday and a Christmas celebration on Thursday, still not feeling great. This was good and we got to enjoy grandboy’s first cake experience. My mom brought a bunch of pictures and my father’s jewelry (he passed away a year ago) for us to share. Daughter won’t let me touch the baby.

Friday, Mom goes to visit her nephew and comes down with, you guessed it, the stomach flu. I drive son, daughter-in-law, and grandson to the airport and go home to finish getting better. Daughter refuses to let Mom back in her house for fear of getting the baby sick, particularly after discovering that baby has jaundice and is not gaining weight. We arrange for Mom to stay with nephew on the other side of Denver and give up getting to visit with her in the hope that she will get better quickly.

The end result thus far has been that I spent almost no time with my kids and grandson, have held my granddaughter about twenty minutes, made my daughter into a nut case, hurt my mom’s feelings, gotten who knows how many people sick, and totally blown what should have been a great holiday.

This is really not the way to do a family reunion. Sigh. Unfortunately, I don’t know quite where the stomach flu came from or how I could have stopped it. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get everybody back to loving each other enough to at least talk on Christmas day. Maybe next year, we’ll have better luck!

Pictures coming in the next day or two; I’m still doing laundry for my daughter to cleanse her house of our contagion.