by Kristina
Christmas Eve in my family is BIG deal. We are Italian and there are many many traditions behind the culture and Christmas Eve, mostly revolving around food and midnight mass if you are Catholic (and usually the 2 are synonymous). A fantastic meal is usually based around several different fish dishes. I love this tradition and I loved helping my grandma clean the squid and the smell of my aunt’s house after the sauce had been cooking all day. We made a few menu changes due to non squid eaters but I wanted Seattle to be no different, so my family and I spent all morning making Christmas Eve dinner.
I was proud, satisfied and excited when everyone sat down for dinner right on time…
Moments into dinner Kai shouts hysterically that something is wrong with a “certain area” on his little male body. Long story short we decide to take him to the on call doc just to make sure something isn’t brewing that could send the poor boy into unbearable pain. We had taken his hearing aids out to give him a quick bath to try and ease the discomfort and then quickly decided to take him to the doc. With that Jason and Kai are off to the hospital.
I load up the rest of the kids (after I ate 4 bites of dinner) and the rest of the company and we are all off to the the Downtown Mars Hill Christmas Eve Service. We are all super excited about this, particularly because our kids are going to sing with the kids choir. Since we are always in Ohio at Christmas we have not had the pleasure of seeing our children sing as part of the Childrens Christmas Choir before.
We are all in the car when we realize we left Kai’s hearing aids back in the bathroom. Great. His singing debut and on Christmas Eve. For Pete’s sake could we be worse parents. And so we put on the jacket of guilt. Jason rushes him to the church after seeing the doc and being told he is not on the brink of medical disaster. He made it just in time. I tell the amazing childrens choir person that “Kai does not have his hearing aids. You will have to look right at him so he can see your lips and tell him what song is next” (The kids had really been practicing.) So as soon as he gets there she looks at him but then rattles off the names of the three songs so quick I barely had time to take a breath.
He just stares at her.
I figured now was not the time to explain that his auditory memory is less than average kids his age and that all those words were probably unheard as the room was super noisy and said so fast even if they were heard there was no time for his partially working hearing to pick it up and retain it.
So I turn to the ever present always ready to help big sister. The conversation went something like this. “Lucia, since Kai does not have his hearing aids you may need to help him know what song is next.” “Ok mom (turns to Kai) Kai, fold you hands like this and we’ll sing Silent Night first.”
Feeling he was in good hands Jason and I head to our seats. The kids come on stage. Kai has his hands over his ears. Usually when he is close the stage he turns his hearing aids off so they act like ear plugs. I am cringing and on the verge of crying because I can’t believe we have failed him in this way. Imagine standing in the ocean with a bunch of out of tune kids singing all around you, not hearing anything that makes sense. But God is amazing, Kai quickly lowered his hands, folded them (as he’d been told) and our 1st and 2nd born sang their little hearts out for Jesus with hands folded the whole time. I was so proud. So grateful for a God full of grace He is able to overcome my incompetance as a parent and produce pure joy through the faces and voices of my children. And just in case seeing them sing wasn’t cute enough Lucia kept poking Kai in his cheek with her folded hands until he would look at her and smile. She did this every few minutes. Later when we asked her what she was doing she said, “I was making sure he smiled.” That’s what big sisters are for, right?!
And so I was reminded by my kids once again on a night when we celebrate that God was born as man to die for our sins, out of grace, guilt free, that all my short comings, all my failings as a wife, mom, human were bought and paid for by an ever loving God.
