Christmas....NOT too far from home

For the last 8 years, I haven't had Christmas Eve AND Christmas Day off (with the exception of the year that I had a collapsed lung and was in the hospital until the day before Christmas Eve, but who can count that, it wasn't like I was having the time of my life!!). This year is no different. The only thing that is different, is the fact that I can't take the ambulance or the ladder truck home on Christmas Day to chill with my family and my crew.

I moved to St. George back in January of this year to go to school. I took a leave of absence from the fire station to come to Southern Utah to get my paramedic. Things haven't turned out ANYTHING like I had hoped they would. However, I do start a class in January. But this blog has nothing to do with school. This is about someone that has been and done so much for me since we started work together back in March of this year. Her name is April Evans. For those of you that know my friend Kayce Lowry from Layton, April is what I call my "Southern Utah Kayce", which means we have so much in common it's scary.

April is the mother of 3 of the cutes little boys, and an incredible wife to her husband Mike. This year for Thanksgiving, April and I both were scheduled to work dispatch, but Mike wasn't quite aware that meant she wouldn't be home for the normal Thanksgiving dinner like they were used to. Instead, April and Mike planned to have it the day before on Wednesday night. April was so sweet and asked if I would come over to their house and have dinner with her and her family. We had a blast. We laughed a ton. It meant so much to me that I could spend time with "family". The 2 older boys and April and Mike call me "Aunt Lyndsay". They will never know what it has meant to me!

Well, for Christmas we have both been dealt the same hand; we both work on Christmas Day. April and Mike have again asked me to come over for Christmas Eve and spend it with their family since mine is up North spending time together at our parents house in Kaysville.

In the mean time, as I sit here in dispatch on this Christmas Eve Day, me and some of the girls are having a little Christmas party of out own. It started at about 0810 when I opened the bag of what I have named "happy apples". They are small, sweet delicious little apples that are small in stature, but HUGE on taste. Then came our center manager who brought in a cheese ball and crackers, so we then decided....heck, why wait for the 7-layer bean dip, it's already 0930...we began our holiday by binge eating for the next 7 hours...at lunch I ran home and threw in a huge dish of "chili Chicken" and brought it back to work...why stop at the bean dip??