Grandma Delivers Baby and Thanksgiving Dinner!

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BOSTON - A Boston woman has succeeded at one of the all-time great Thanksgiving Dayjuggling acts: She cooked the turkey while helping deliver her baby granddaughter. Patricia McCalop was in the middle of preparing the meal when her daughter suddenly went into labor two weeks early.

McCalop called 911, and a dispatcher talked her through the delivery and helped her confirm that the baby girl was breathing. Patricia McCalop said she kept running between the kitchen and her daughter in labor because she didn't want the turkey to burn while helping her child deliver the baby.

"I'm like, 'What are you doing with the turkey? We got the baby,'" Africa McCalop told the Boston Herald. "She didn’t know what to do. She’s like, 'I got to go get the turkey baster.' I’m like, 'For what?'"

The infant weighed six pounds.
Did they all watch the football game afterwards? :confused:
 
"No, no Grandma. We use the turkey baster before the baby, not afterward's."
 
There's a story that'll get passed down through the generations...
 
There's a story that'll get passed down through the generations...
I can see at least one kid who is going to be hating Thanksgiving because they'll be telling that story each and every time :D
 
I can see at least one kid who is going to be hating Thanksgiving because they'll be telling that story each and every time :D

He'll emigrate to Canada where they have it on a day that can't possibly coincide with his birthday! :D
 
He'll emigrate to Canada where they have it on a day that can't possibly coincide with his birthday! :D

Eventually, you get to treasure family stories because they're with you when everything else has gone.

The story is told in my family that I was born approximately a year earlier than had been planned, because my parents had had too much Christmas punch and forgotten to use any of their usual precautions. There are people in some of the forums I hang out in who'd regard this as TMI and ghastly, but I thought it was rather dear of them, considering that my mother was, and is, a devout Christian Scientist: if not for this story, I'd have assumed that she'd simply closed her eyes and recited the Scientific Statement of Being throughout the process...
 
And, of course, the stories outlive the participants. Like the one about Uncle Luigi and the eel . . . :D
 
Back in the '20's and 30's, the entire extended clan lived on both sides of a single street in L.A. Luigi was married to one of my grandfather's older sisters, Aunt Isabel. Luigi loved to cook. According to reports, he wasn't all that good at it but when he invited people over they knew there was a free meal coming and during the Depression, that was not to be sneezed at. Anyway, his favorite was Christmas Eve and in the Italian tradition that meant fish. Uncle Luigi would cook anything that swam but a mermaid. In downtown L.A. is the Grand Central Market. Yes, it's still there and it hasn't changed a whole lot in the last seventy-five years though the diversity of the stall owners has increased.

Luigi went to the market one Christmas looking for fish and as he was walking and buying, he saw, stretched out on the ice, an eel. We don't have eels out here on the Left Coast so this thing had been caught back East, iced up and shipped by train all the way across the country. Luigi just had to have that eel so he took it home and tossed it into the sink full of water while he started on the other aquatics. He was happily filleting and chopping away when he heard a splash and a thump. The eel had come back to life, jumped out of the sink and was making tracks across Isabel's brand new linoleum floor for the nearest ocean.

Aunt Isabel let out a shriek and jumped up onto the kitchen counter. Seeing his dear wife's distress, Luigi manfully came to her defense. He grabbed a cleaver and started chasing the eel around the kitchen swinging wildly. When Isabel saw the devastation he was wrecking on her new floor, she screamed again and jumped down. Grabbing a broom, she pinned the proposed main course into a corner so Luigi could dispatch it more accurately. Then she told him in no uncertain terms what she thought of the escapade. Eventually, the eel did end up on the dinner table (after midnight Mass, of course) and Isabel got a new kitchen floor for Christmas! :D



What most younger members of the family find most amazing is that they actually had an Uncle Luigi! :D
 
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