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As part of my "day job", I wrote a handy guide to help busy moms finish up their holiday shopping.
I hope you’ll find plenty of ideas in it to complete those hard to shop for folks on your list.
Free to read, print and share…
Click Here For Your Free Gift Guide
Enjoy!
Thanks to so many of you that have commented and contacted me via email and twitter with prayers and well wishes about my uncle’s accident. Your support and positive energy was much appreciated. I’m thankful for all of you. 
My uncle has made enough improvement and proved stable enough to go home from the hospital earlier today. He will still need physical therapy and daily help from others for awhile as his injuries and surgeries from the accident has left him unable to function as usual. His being alive and recovering is definitely worth being thankful for this Thanksgiving.
If you’ve been reading my blog, following me on twitter, or deal with me online to any degree, then you probably know that I’ve been entertaining some “little people” in my home the past few days to relieve family at the hospital with my uncle.
So, on Saturday my mom and I brought the kids back to my house to play outside and have pizza after we returned from the Bee Movie at the theatre. We were just finishing up the pizza when the doorbell rang. It was my neighbor boy from up the street. Apparently, my sweet ol’ granny dog was running loose. Assuming the “little people” visiting had accidentally opened the gate in the back yard, I yelled for someone to find her leash and I took off in the direction the neighbor pointed.
Two blocks over, I see my dog frolicking in someone else’s yard. I stop to catch my breath and a man puttering around in his yard asks if that’s my dog. I look at him like he should be shot for asking such a stupid question and nod my head. Then I gasped, “She’s pretty old, she’ll lay down in a minute and then I can get her”.
About that time, she takes off running again and disappears around the corner. When I make it to the corner, I run past a dog laying on the lawn of the house on the corner and think how coincidental that the dog looks similar to mine. As I turn the corner, I see two teen boys walking toward me, but no dog. So I ask them if they’ve seen my dog and which way she went. They give me the same look I gave the man up the street and say, “We didn’t see any dog, lady”. So I turn back around the corner to see the man up the street closing in on the dog on the lawn and my husband with leash wearing only socks!
Embarrassed, I tell the man that the dog he’s trying to capture isn’t even my dog. Donald is looking exasperated after running three blocks in his socks to bring me the leash and the good samaritan from up the street is looking at us like we are both total nut-jobs.
Seconds later, the neighbor that sent her son to alert us that my dog was out pulled up in her car to help with the dog hunt. We tell her it’s not my dog and she apologizes and offers us a ride home. Because I’m only mildly stupid and sweat drenched, I accept her offer and laugh all the way home.
As soon as we got out of the car, we went straight to the back yard to verify that my sweet ol’ granny dog is truly there. I swear, she looked at me like I should be shot and with her huge brown eyes said, “Next time check the backyard first, stupid human”! 
The past five days have been unbelievably emotional, exhausting and downright freakish. I apologize up front, because I will likely make several posts back to back about the past few days.
To start with, last Wednesday we heard that Donald’s aunt suffered a stroke. Biscuit and Wrangler are absolutely NUTS about her and I’ve always thought she was the sweetest little lady I’ve ever met. I suppose it goes without saying that Donald was upset.
Thursday morning as I’m hitting my work groove, I get a phone call from my mom telling me that my uncle (who just happened to drop in for an unscheduled visit on Wednesday for about an hour) was hit by a car. It took me several minutes to realize that her level of panic was because his BODY was hit by a car… it wasn’t a normal car accident.
Apparently, he was driving to work behind a feed truck carrying molasses on the two lane divided loop around town. Somehow, the load became unstable and spilled molasses while my uncle was behind it. Unable to see and losing control of his vehicle, he hit the embankment. Stunned, he crawled out of his vehicle only to be struck by another driver that lost control of their vehicle when they hit the molasses. There’s no way to be certain how fast the car was going, but the speed limit on the loop is 60 MPH.
Now, my uncle is a HUGE man. He’s probably about 6′4 and even though he has recently lost weight, (and was looking better than I’ve seen him in years the day before the accident) he’s still a guy you’d worry about fighting if you were the last two people on earth and there was only ONE bread crumb left to eat. Let me paint the picture a little better for you… he’s an ex-professional wrestler. I’m not talking fake Hulk Hogan television wrestling, folks. I’m talking about the real deal with barbed clubs, chairs, cages and blood. The kind of wrestling that scares the living poop out of you if you happen to be sitting in the front row…
So, as of yesterday, he was doing better, with surgeries completed. His thigh bone was shattered and a steel plate was put in to replace the bone. He has pins in both wrists. His forehead looks like one of the cavemen from the Geico commercials or the new sitcom (if you watch it). He’s pretty heavily medicated on pain killers and is unable to ring the call light for a nurse by himself. We thought the worst was over and recovery was ahead.
Today, it was discovered that his pelvic bone is probably broken as well. It gets worse… now it’s determined that he’s bleeding internally but the hospital hasn’t determined where yet. He is now receiving blood transfusions.
Through this ordeal, there has been many family members in and out as well as his friends, coworkers and church members. I’ve felt very helpless and the most help I’ve been able to be is keeping his daughter overnight the night of the accident. My mother and I also took her, another young cousin and my boys out to McDonald’s on Friday after school. We then took the kids to see the Bee Movie on Saturday then back to my house for pizza and playing.
I know that his injuries are so severe that it will be an extremely long recovery and much help will be needed from our family and community to get him and his family through it. I hope that I can be of help then because he’s never hesitated to drop everything he’s doing and come running to help me or my children when I’ve been in trouble.
Because I can think of nothing else I can do to make a difference now, I have decided that I will go down and donate blood tomorrow. Even though the odds are small that my blood will actually be used for him, it makes me feel good to know that I’ll be helping to refill what he has used for the next person that may desperately need it. What do you when you feel powerless and helpless in a family crisis?
