A New Year's Eve to Remember

It was New Year's Eve!  The weeks of preparing for the joint adult and Young Men, Young Women dance had culminated in a space theme celebration.  Since both Jim and I worked in the youth program, we had a major part in the planning and decorating for this event.  We had had a rocket and satellite building contest a few weeks before which provided decorations which we hung from the ceiling.  In today's vernacular, we would say they were "awesome".  We covered the walls with scenes of sky and clouds to provide a feeling of outer space.  We had worked very hard, not only on the decorations, but to prepare special refreshments for the evening.  We really hadn't had time to recover from the stress of Christmas before we had to jump right into the dance, so we were pretty tired when Christmas Eve arrived.

The dance was a success.  Jim actually danced more than one dance.  Those of you know my sweetheart know that he hates to dance.  That's just one (but not a very important one) of his flaws.  I love to dance.  He used to say that I could have one dance a year, and that was it.  I don't think I have averaged even that over our 55 years of marriage.  I KNOW I haven't.  Anyway... as you all know, the responsibility of cleaning up after an event usually falls on the same people who have done all the work setting up.  Such was the case this night.  All ;of a sudden, as I began to help, I began feeling really ill.  I thought all the hours I had spent in preparation for this night had finally caught up with me. I just couldn't do any more.  I curled up on a couple of chairs at the side of the hall and waited for the others to finish.

I still felt sick the next morning when I woke up ... and the next ... and the next.  Only now I REALLY felt sick.  I couldn't keep anything down, not even water.  I finally made an appointment with the doctor to get some help.  Well, you guessed it, I was pregnant.  (So much for the predictions of my last doctor who said I would likely not be able to have any more children.)  I had never been this sick with my other three pregnancies. The only thing that would stay down was black tea, which my doctor (the only OB-Gyn. in town) insisted that I drink to keep from dehydrating, and an occasional dry cracker.  That was my diet for the first three months.  I tried other foods, and I'm sure I did get some nutrition from the few that stayed down, but not much.  I lost a lot of weight those first months.  I remember how hard it was to take care of the girls when I was so sick ... and so tired.   How I wished I lived closer to family at this time.

The whole family was excited about having a new addition to the family, but none of us was prepared for what happened next.