The Holiday starts.

Woke up this morning and both girls are sicky.  Pint has a sinus infection, and ½ pint has a rash. And so it begins.

Someone is always sick at Thanksgiving.  In our family, it’s a tradition.  ¾ Pint is also sick today.  At her school, they are having the Thanksgiving feast.  As of last night, her mother, Nursey, had made a pumpkin pie that ¾ Pint could eat, and several other food items.

There are only 10 children in ¾ Pint’s class. She still attends the local Catholic school that my girls attended until we moved too far away. Actuallly, it wasn’t any farther away, but the gas to get them there and then come back home, then go back and pick them up and then go back home would have been a whopping $20 a day!  And, that made it MORE than the tuition. Just didn’t make sense!!

Anyway, I don’t know if ¾ Pint got to go to school for the Feast that she was so looking forward to.

I kept both girls home this morning.  This afternoon starts their vacation anyway.  They both have a Dr appt at 11 am this morning, so I will go into town with them, to the Dr’s, then to the bank, then to the grocery store (I hate shopping with kidlets present in the store…I HATE IT) then home to start the baking for Thursday.

This year, it won’t be too bad.  Every ten years, Thanksgiving is on the day of my mother’s birthday.  She was a Thanksgiving baby.  I always miss her, she has been dead now for 21 years, but I miss her more for some reason when Thanksgiving is on her birthday.

When she was born in 1933, the doctor didn’t believe my grandmother was pregnant again.  It was the fifth pregnancy, and gram was close to menopause.  The doctor told her she had a uterine tumor.  Of course, back then, they didn’t have diagnostic equipment like they do now.

Anyway, when she went into labor, they headed down to the local hospital, which was the upstairs of the doctors home.  The doctor wouldn’t let her in.  He told her she was constipated and had a tumor and he wasn’t going to admit her for that.

Knowing she was in labor, my grandmother told my grandfather to get her to the nearest hospital.

They lived in Chico, California.  Not knowing what else to do, he headed to the railway station.  There was a turkey freight train headed for San Francisco.  Driving time from Chico to SF is about 4 ½ hours.

They hopped the freight train.  It was about midnight on the day before Thanksgiving.

She was born about 3 hours later, on the freight train, surrounded by turkeys on their way to  certain death and nice crisp brown skin…..

Not a dignified way to enter the world, but a nice story !!  True also.

My grandmother brought the baby back home, and showed her to the doctor, who didn’t even apologize for missing the pregnancy. How rude!!

I miss her.