I woke up in the extra hospital bed in H’s room this morning to a very friendly nurse standing over me and whispering, “Happy Mother’s Day! I’ll bet you feel extra lucky this year.”

Not only was it sweet of her to wish me a Happy Mom Day, she’s obviously right that this year, the day has extra special meaning for me (although to be honest with you, I totally forgot it was Mother’s Day today until last night when I was reminded by the sweet card and tasty chocolates that H’s father and stepmother left in the room for me when we traded hospital shifts for the night).

H is still sound asleep this morning – they have started him on a medication to help sleep and increase his nonexistent appetite (he’s lost 23 lbs in less than 2 weeks) – and I am just sitting here next to his bed this morning, watching him snooze and wondering what he’s dreaming about. As more specific – and horrific – details of the trauma he endured slowly emerge, I fear that his dreams are haunted with terrible things and people. As I sit next to him, which is mostly all I want to do these days, I think back over the past 18 years of Mother’s Days he and I have shared together. I remember the handmade cards from kindergarten and first grade,and the misshapen ceramic turtle he proudly brought home to me as a gift for Mother’s Day the year he was in second grade. For sixth grade, he wrote me a wonnderful poem. And then I remember Mother’s Day 2009, just last year, when he had just left home for what turned out to be nearly a year of inpatient addiction treatment. I missed him terribly, but was SO hopeful that he would be “fixed” when he returned, and that our family could get back to normal – whatever the hell that means.

I also keep looking down at my giant belly this morning and trying to wrap my head around the fact that in just about 8 weeks, we will have a new child joining our family. Ever since H was taken to the hospital, I have just basically forgotten that I am pregnant, except when I’m reminded by one of the nurses asking me when I am due. I feel the baby kicking and wiggling around in there each day, but I am so very focused on baby #1′s recovery at the moment that baby #5 seems like a made-up something. Totally unreal. But she is real, and I know that soon we have to do at least a few things to prepare for her arrival – my last two babies came 3 and 4 weeks early, respectively. But I have no idea how or when Jon and I will find the time to haul boxes up from the basement and at least wash a few sleepers and receiving blankets so she will have something to wear, or how we’ll ever get time to find the packed-up baby swing, bassinet or infant carseat. We also haven’t had any chance to start emptying, cleaning and painting the completely unrenovated junk room that is theoretically supposed to become a bedroom/nursery for C and newbaby to share. The idea was to get a big girl bed set up in there so we could start the process of transitioning C out of our bed and into the big girl bed before her new baby sister makes an arrival – so that newbaby can move into our bed, where C has slept every night for the past 2.5 years. Now I am wondering if we will instead need to ready that room for H when he is released from rehab, since his old room is on the second floor of our house, and he may need to have access to everything on the first floor for some period of time during his post-rehab recovery phase. I guess we’ll just figure this all out as we go. (Just keep swimming…swimmming…swimming…)

I feel like I have totally ignored poor E and J since H was hospitalized. E has spent the last three days staying with his cousins at Aunt Betsy’s, which is definitely a second home to him, but I can tell he’s also anxious and homesick. J has been very independent for the past two weeks, keeping herself organized and getting to school each morning via the kindness of friends and neighbors who have taken over my morning school driving routine. I love driving her to school each morning. It’s a great 30 minute catch-up for us each day, and I have missed it a lot in recent weeks. I think she has too. But thank God for her good friends (and their amazingly wonderful parents) who have acted as “extra mothers” during all of this, having her over to spend the night, helping her with homework and giving her the extra hugs she’s missed while her parents and step parents have been spending moment at the hospital.

All the help I am getting right now with feeding, transporting, organizing, and generally loving on my children makes me realize that we are really a village of “mothers” – all of us. Women and men, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, neighbors, friends, coworkers, teachers …. All of these people and more have really stepped in to help me mother my own children in the past few weeks. Some of you have “mothered” me with your kind messages, blog comments and emails, while others have helped by guiding us in navigating the criminal justice system to try to make sure arrests are made in the assault on my child (thus also assisting in protecting ALL the children and young people in our community). And I am just so grateful to every single one of you. Really, there are just no words to express the gratitude I feel

So this year, I want to say Happy Mother’s Day to all of you, to every single person reading this who has helped someone else with caring for and nurturing children in the past 12 months. I realize more with every year that passes that while some of us actually give birth to the children in our communities, we’re really all in this mothering thing together.

Find out over in my latest blog post at Babble (hint: it’s holiday-related).

It was a good one – the best ever, said E (he says that every year though).

Hope yours was merry, merry as well!

Happy Holidays from the HickJu Clan!

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Last night on Christmas Eve, C and NC – along with J and E and cousins ET and MT – participated in the Nativity Pageant at our church. The toddlers played sheep in the pageant, and we talked 14 year old J into playing the part of a sheep as well, for the sole purpose of attempting to keep C and NC in line during the service. She was a very good sport about the whole thing.

Hilarity ensued.

These photos don’t do justice to how hard J had to work to try to keep the two naughty little sheep from escaping from the Nativity Scene in which they were supposed to remain in place up on the altar at the front of our church sanctuary. They kept wriggling free from her grasp, then crawling commando style down the steps before easing themselves out between the altar railings. Then they would grin at the audience, trot back up the steps and do it all over again.

They did this throughout the pageant, even as all the OTHER children behaved very well. Look how irritated J looks by the final photo in the series…and can you blame her? Wild, marauding lambs were going berserk, and she had no shepherd’s crook with which to whack them or hook them…or whatever it is one does with a shepherd’s crook.

Guess which one of The Baby Cousins was the instigator?

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

C and NC wait to be measured and fitted for their costumes (they’re both playing sheep) for the church Christmas pageant. The cupcakes helped make the wait more bearable.

Also today, C suddenly stood up and yelled out, “THIS IS THE BEST CHWISSMAS EVER!!”

The holiday season is in full swing here at Casa HickJu, and I am loving it. My only complaints are that as usual, I seem to have spent far too much money, after promising myself – as I do each year – that THIS YEAR, I will spend less. And secondly, it’s going way too fast

To point #1, the overspending, it’s very, very hard not to go overboard on holiday spending when you love Christmas like I do. It’s the only time each year when I really go all out on “stuff.” I am very much not a “stuff” person; we have a lot of hand me down furniture, and I don’t have jewelry to speak of or lots of clothing (although I do love clothes and if I had plenty of money to spend on them, I certainly would. But I don’t) I very, very rarely buy my children any sort of “between times” toys or superfluous clothing (meaning between birthdays or Christmas) In fact they would tell you that I am downright cheap compared to their friends’ parents.

And this year, money is VERY tight because after my bizarre, major illness from October, I have 5k or more in out of pocket medical costs (after insurance payout) for which we are responsible. Sigh. We also had some other large, unexpected expenses this year that have been tricky to manage. I can’t say this hasn’t made for a somewhat stressful 2009, and for the first time ever, we had to stick to buying gifts for all of the children in our large, extended family instead of buying for both children and all the grown-ups, too.

Despite this, I still likely spent too much on Christmas this year. Good thing Santa supplies most of the gifts, and I only have to cover some. As I always tell the kids when they occasionally suggest that Santa might not be real (blasphemy!), do they really think that I could pay for all the stuff they find under the tree on Christmas morning? I think not!

But anyway, yeah, the holiday season is zipping by far too quickly. It always seems to go by too fast because my older kids spend every other week with their father, so I only get tham half the time in the run-up to Christmas, and seeing the kids enjoy the decorations and the popcorn and the Christmas movies and the tree are what make Christmas so fun. So in the past seven years, since we started this schedule where we split the holidays, Christmastime has always seemed somewhat abbreviated to me. This year, of course, C is old enough to enjoy all of the above, and she lives at our house all the time, so it’s a little better, but even all these years later, and even knowing that it’s the best option – because we obviously want to make sure that the kids get plenty of time during the holidays in both of their homes – I miss them extra during the holidays. They are at their Dad’s this week, and then they will return home Sunday and stay until Christmas Day afternoon, when they will go back to their other house for the remainder of the holiday. I cannot WAIT to get them home on Sunday evening, and start our holiday season in earnest. I know that C can’t wait to have them here either. She’s getting old enough now that she really misses “Sissy,” “Ewwiot” and “Henwy” when they are not here. She prefers to have her sibs about. (H, by the way, finished high school in November, and is currently spending his time couch surfing and attending concerts across the state of Tennessee. Don’t get me started…)

A few holiday snaps from the week past (and remember that I tend to do all of my photo taking with the crummy camera on my BlackBerry, so I end up with quantity over quality. Oh well.)

Stockings hung by the chimney with care.

Jon and me at the Ackermann Holiday Party last night. (Hats courtesy of Flickr/Piknik)

C loves the Christmas snow globes. She’s on her Daddy’s lap here.

I asked Dr. Neighbor if he thought he could make some toffee with chocolate crust on top, like my mother always makes during the holidays, and without a recipe or even going to the store for ingredients, he whipped some right up for me. It’s super tasty! He’s awesome like that. Here he is in his candymaking workshop – AKA his kitchen.

Our Halloween this year was off-kilter. Because I was really sick in the weeks leading up to the actual event, our usual family pumpking carving event with the cousins didn’t happen.  On the night we finally got it done, I was still unable to get out of bed, so my mother and Dr. Neighbor (the guy professor edition, as opposed to the female MD edition) helped Jon oversee J and E in getting their respective jack o’ lanterns carved at our kitchen table. My mom had come up from Bell Buckle to spend that night following my first full day back at work since I had gotten sick. She helped with dinner and with general kid wrangling because she knew I would be exhausted. And she was right.

All three younger kids have been anxious and out of sorts  in the past month due to my illness (which really did end up lasting an entire month, start to finish) and other challenging family issues that we are dealing with at the moment, including the fact that our plan to have Eldest Child live at home after his recent return from Big Learning Experience has fallen through. We have all been struggling with this, each in our own way.  His younger siblings were stressed by the conversations that led up to this decision, and are now stressed by adjusting to their big brother’s absence from our house, which wasn’t what we expected after his eight months away.  All of this has made for a really hard autumn season for our family, and as a result, no one seemed to have their usual enthusiasm for the jack o’ lantern carving.

But somehow, with the help from my mother & Dr. Neighbor that night, it got done. J started out by insisting that she had NO interest in joining in without participation by the absent H and her cousins (she was feeling very glum about everything), but the grown-ups insisted, and within just a few minutes, she had cheered up and gotten into the spirit of things.  C thought it was great fun, as this was the first year that she understood what was going on. By the end of the evening, the children had turned out three pretty good jack o’ lanterns, although definitely not our family’s most impressive efforts ever, and Dr. Neighbor had done this wonderful saute/roast thing with the pumpkin seeds – best pumpkin seeds I have ever had, hands down.  We did the best we could considering the gloomy household mood.

A few days later, it was time for Halloween. J and E’s schedule happened to have them at their father’s house on Halloween proper, so 2 year old C was the only child in the household that day.   All week, she had been enjoying dressing up in various loaned costumes (bunny, dragon) passed along by an older cousin.  She surely would have enjoyed some trick or treating up and down our street. But on the 31st, it was pouring rain all day – a bad harbinger for Halloween night activities. Then, for only the second time in her life, she refused to nap. That meant that by the time she and Jon returned from the church Halloween party in the late afternoon, she was hysterically exhausted.

Note glazed expression and flushed cheeks. Portrait of an almost-sick bunny-toddler.

It was also pretty obvious by Halloween afternoon that she was getting sick  – fever erupted within 24 hours. Her cheeks were flushed and her mood was rotten. She had clearly been picking up on my stress, and that day, she finally began letting us know that she was stressed, too – whining, clinging, and flinging herself on the floor in floods of tears if you looked at her wrong.

By 6pm, she was out for the night.  This left Jon and me in the unusual situation of having not one of the four kids around for the actual holiday festivities. It ended up being a very low-key, all adult Halloween. And frankly, that was fantastic.  Dr. Neighbor hung out for part of the evening and fixed a yummy pasta dish that involved spicy sausage. He prepared a special beverage I have been known to enjoy – one that only he makes as well.  I laid around on the couch in my bathrobe and we three – Jon, Dr. Neighbor and I – listened to Girl Talk (not appropriate with kids in the room) with the guys answering the occasional doorbell to hand out candy to the few trick or treaters who braved the drizzle in the ‘hood to approach out front door.  I was feeling so antisocial that evening that even offering cheery greetings to kids in costumes seemed daunting.

So yeah, we’ve had a rough go of it lately at our house, and in some ways Halloween seemed like the denouement.  But at least we had pumpkins. Back in 2005, I stupidly waited until the last minute to go out for pumpkins, only to find that no pumpkins were to be had anywhere at any price in the greater Knoxville area.  In a fit of desperation, I brought home….decorative gourds.

Yes, my children had GOURDS instead of pumpkins that Halloween. They were pretty good natured about it actually.

As you can see, E actually fell asleep on the floor at my sister’s house that night, clutching his gourd. He really took to it. I finally had to insist that we throw it out when it began attracting fruit flies in his room, where he kept it for longer than a good parent would have allowed

.

I really have no excuse for The Year of the Gourds except poor planning on my part. I’m sure it’s one of the stories about me that my kids will tell in therapy.  But I can now take small solace in the fact that my wildly capable and well organized friend K had a similar experience this year. She couldn’t find pumpkins either, and her kids ended up with….jack o’ loupes.

Our holiday weekend, in video over at Babble.

A year or two ago, my children left a note for the Easter Bunny asking him to reveal his “real name.” He left a note in return. His answer: “Bob Thornton”