A Christmas Miracle

Something pretty amazing happened today.  I was teaching my 2nd graders writing and the genre we have been studying is "Friendly Letters".  Yesterday we started working on a thank you letter to thank someone for their favorite gift or just for being a nice person.  I read them a cute book called "Thank You, Santa" and they picked who they were going to write to.  Today we started on the prewriting, and I always model my own sample first so they can see how to do it, then they get to write theirs.  I put my thinking map under the elmo (I realize I'm using some teacher lingo here, just bear with me) and started to think on my toes about who I would write to and what I would say.  I decided to write to Santa to go along with the letter I had written him as a sample before the winter break.  In that letter, I had asked him for two things:  for Ryan to continue to grow healthier and stronger and coffee. (I know, random.  But they're 2nd graders and they often help me come up with ideas, so the coffee part was partly them because they see me with it every morning). 

So I start formulating this letter to Santa.  I get as far as this:

Dear Santa,

when one of my students asks, "Did you get the coffee?"  which is when I remember that I had asked for coffee in the first letter to Santa.  Then it dawns on me that I had also asked for Ryan to get healthier and stronger for Christmas.  Which is when my face lit up and I told the class, "Yes!  I DID get some coffee!  And you know what?  I got another Christmas Miracle!  Remember how I asked Santa to make Ryan better for Christmas?  Well, he got a little bit sick when the break started.  And then it slowly started to get a little worse.  So we took him into the hospital to get checked on Christmas Eve, and we were sad because we really thought they might make him stay in the hospital for Christmas.  But you know what?  They didn't make him stay!  They let him come home with us, and he was really happy to have his very first Christmas at home.  In fact, he waited until Christmas was all the way over, just after midnight, before he got sick again.  So we took him back to the hospital, and this time he had to stay for a little bit."

I could see some of their faces were a little bit saddened by that, so I continued.  You should know that the easiest way to get me to go on a tangent is to talk about my kids.  Anyways, so I said,  "But you know what?  There was another Christmas Miracle, even though he had to go stay in the hospital, we were so lucky because they told us that if he got sick and went back in the hospital he might be in there a REALLY long time, like weeks or months.  And you know what?  Somehow, someway, he only had to stay in there 8 days!"

It was actually the first time I counted, and I must have been very convincing with my delivery because their faces lit up with how miraculous it was.  Even little B, who is very bright and my biggest Santa skeptic (excerpt from his letter to Santa:  "Dear Santa, Please bring me *insert impossible gift here*, a ferrari, and $1,000,000.  If you bring me those things, I will believe in you.  If you don't, I won't believe in you.  If you bring me something else, I won't believe in you."  No joke.  This is a SECOND grader! LOL) looked at me with a huge grin on his face and said, "WOW!"

So then, of course, I had to continue.  "Yup, he got to stay home with us for Christmas, then he just popped over to the hospital for a measly 8 days, got completely better, and came back home with us!  And guess what?  Now that he's back home, he's healthier and stronger than ever!  He's starting to hold his head up more and sit up more and we can really tell he's growing bigger and stronger every day!"  They were so impressed that Santa really had delivered on his Christmas gift to me.  And as happy and blessed as I felt about Ryan over the break, it really didn't dawn on me how truly miraculous it all was until I talked it over with my 2nd graders.  I really did get everything I wished for this Christmas.