Happy Thanksgiving---the extra thankful edition

I know Thanksgiving is a little outdated now with Christmas on the horizon (less than 2 weeks away, really??), but I have too much to be thankful for to skip over it completely. Three weeks ago we took a trip up to New York and Pennsylvania to spend time with my family for Thanksgiving. We had been looking forward to the trip for several months and when we finally all got together the occasion did not disappoint. The kids were in heaven to be with cousins and the activities we had planned felt close to perfect. I have plenty of pictures of our fun weekend; however, since Thanksgiving is all about gratitude I feel like I have to jump directly to the most traumatic experience of our trip since I have no doubt it occurred in a way that we can only feel immense feelings of gratitude for.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving while we were all together in Pennsylvania we had planned to go to a nearby indoor water park. The temperatures were close to freezing outside, but inside it was  perfect--just like the rides that the kids dashed to and from for hours. We were just about done for the evening when Sam and my brother-in-law decided to give the surfing/body boarding simulator a try.

My brother-in-law went first, and, although it appeared to be a bit of a rough ride, Sam decided to go for it anyways.

It didn't start out too bad...


 

...but on his last run things didn't go so well--


at all.

As soon as he got up he knew something was wrong. He had fallen on his head and left side, yet it was his right arm that was tingling and numb along with pain in his neck. After sitting for a few moments he decided he needed to go to the hospital. My dad and brother-in-law took him while my sister and I took the kids home and waited to hear the news. A few hours later I got the call the he had indeed fractured a vertebrae in his neck and chipped another.  It wasn't the best news, but for a fractured vertebrae finding out that he had no permenant spinal cord or nerve damage was just about the best news we could get. It wasn't until later when we discovered that only 3% of the people who fracture a vertebrae in their neck do not become paralyzed or die that we fully understood the magnitude of our blessing. It is definitely a sobering statistic and will leave us forever grateful for the comparatively small trial we are currently enduring.

Sam is in a neck brace 24/7 for 5 weeks with the major limitation being that he can not drive or lift anything more than 10 lbs. He has also endured some expected discomfort, pain and soreness, but, all things considered, he is doing pretty well.

I told Sam he wasn't going to get any sympathy with this picture...

so he gave me these.


He doesn't always feel this cheerful about the neck brace, but he is doing his best to have a good attitude. (He told someone at work he felt like Guy Smiley.)


This certainly isn't what anyone would hope for from their Thanksgiving weekend, but in the end it's almost appropriate timing since I don't think I've ever felt so grateful in my life. Things are a little inconvenient now, but whenever I find myself getting a little overwhelmed ( I think I can officially cross "chauffeur" off my list of desired future professions)  I try to immediately turn back to the immense feelings of gratitude that should (and usually do) define this experience. There is no doubt--we have been blessed.