It’s easy to forget the true meaning of Christmas. The present buying, the parties, the 
preparations for the kid’s Christmas show and so on make it a very busy time. It’s easy to forget this is a religious celebration with the concept of charity and gift-giving at its core.
With this in mind, I thought I’d write something acknowledging those occasions when I’ve been a ‘parent in need’ and someone has leapt to my aid. Below are just three examples, I could easily think of many more. I hope you enjoy and can maybe relate to them.
I invite you to leave a comment outlining a few examples yourself. I also wish you a very happy Christmas and for those of you with young children, I hope you get to lie in beyond 4am.
“It’s only baby sick, it won’t hurt you”
I was in a Kodak store with our eldest on a mission to get photographs taken for her first passport. She would have been a few months old and thoroughly enjoyed a good posset after each feed.
The photographer was about to start taking pictures when the little one started poseting. A little wipe of the mouth and all was good. Or so I thought. She started poseting again and again and basically started vomiting.
I was mortified. Baby puke was all over the floor. I ran out of wipes to mop it up and didn’t know what to do.
From behind me I heard a voice and a lovely young woman and her friend stepped forward with a fistful of tissues. They even joined in and started cleaning up the baby sick with me.
The guy behind the counter didn’t particularly want to get involved but my new friends were having none of it. Having helped mop up my daughters vomit one of thrust a handful of milk-saturated tissues in his direction. At a volume so loud it was barely decent she said: “Have you got a bin behind that counter? It’s only baby sick, it won’t do you any harm.”
I was very grateful for their intervention and thanked them repeatedly as they left. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the photographs did make it into her passport.
It would have been a very dark place without you
Regular readers will know my wife gave birth just a few weeks ago. Shortly after the birth she was re-admitted to hospital because her blood pressure was sky high and there were concerns she had eclampsia (thankfully she didn’t).
That first week following the birth should have been a time of great celebration but it was instead very stressful for all of us. I couldn’t have kept the household running without support from both my mother and mother in law and I’ll always be grateful to them.
I also lost count of the number of people that offered help and assistance. It’s times like that you see the best side of people and how incredibly generous they can be.
Can I give you a lift?
I’d just had surgery on my ankle and was using crutches while I recovered. I was unable to drive and so my daughter was taken to nursery in a taxi. On this one occasion, however, I wanted to test out my ankle and so took her on the bus.
This turned out to be a test of my own stupidity, not a test of my healing ankle. Having got off the bus we had to walk the last hundred metres up a steep hill. My daughter tripped over at the bottom of the hill and fell flat on her face. When she fell, she somehow took me down with her and we both ended up rolling around in the only patch of mud for some considerable distance. Just to add a little more comic spice to the scenario, this happened right in front of a bunch of school kids.
As we struggled to our feet, a very kind man who had seen us tumble to the ground wound down his car window and offered us a lift. I only had the vaguest connections with him and wouldn’t normally have accepted the offer but my daughter was in tears and I knew I’d been stupid for attempting the journey. I buckled and we clambered into his car. It’s just as well I did because there was no way I would have made it up that hill!
