A Time to Give Thanks

As anyone who has followed my blog over the past month is aware, things have been a bit bleak around the old homestead. Every single person in my house has had a cold/flu bug which has taken us more than 2 weeks to shake. Fifty percent of us - my parents - ended up in the hospital from it, and my mom is still hooked up to an oxygen tank. Not a fun time.

Luckily, we are all feeling a bit better now, which is truly incredible considering that my mother, who has smoked gleefully and faithfully for over 40 years, was informed this past weekend that she had a rather advanced case of COPD and would need to stop smoking immediately.

I remember how tough it was to quit, and I only smoked for less than 10 years. I also had the luxury of setting my own timetable and game plan for quitting. Needless to say, I was expecting Mom to be a bit of a crankypants for at least the next few weeks - and understandably so. Imagine my surprise to instead find her in what I would call an extraordinarily good mood since she's been home from the hospital. I would say that she's actually in higher spirits than I've seen her in years.

Mom has become increasingly depressive over the past decade, as her neurological disability has slowly yet steadily robbed her of her freedom, her ability to walk and drive, and her plans for being an active, helpful participant in the lives of her grandchildren. Each passing day seems to bring a new limitation on what she can safely do on her own, which must certainly be extremely difficult to handle emotionally. So any upswing in her mood is cause for celebration. That this has coincided with the end of her smoking (hopefully for good) is nothing short of a miracle.

We have all been a bit bummed by the fact that we were so sick that we completely missed Thanksgiving this year, so Mom's pleasant demeanor over the past few days has jumpstarted a bit of the festive mood that had so far eluded us this holiday season. It occurred to me yesterday that Mark had purchased a turkey for us for Thanksgiving, which had been languishing forgotten in the fridge ever since he succumbed to the family plague. If we were going to salvage it, we would need to cook it up ASAP.

So, with the addition of a few cans of green beans, mushroom soup & french fried onions, we had a holiday meal in the making. Throw in some Stovetop stuffing, mashed potatoes & gravy, cranberry sauce and a can of crescent rolls and voila! Thanksgiving was joyfully resurrected for our little family unit. Nothing fancy, but no hours of cooking and cleaning were necessary either, which suited us fine this year. I just popped that turkey in the oven & waited for the timer to ring.

And I think we were all happy to have this opportunity, belated as it was, to celebrate and to give thanks. It's been a tough road, but we're all glad to be on the road to recovery. After Mom's breathing scare, we're all keenly aware of how lucky we are to be together around the table at all, much less around a table filled with our favorite foods. While it is easy to get bogged down in negativity when the going gets rough, the truth is that we are each of us blessed every day in a multitude of ways.

And for that, we give thanks.

Birthday Booty-Shaking and Flu Pandemics

I wanted to apologize for my recent absence here, which has been due to several factors.

The first distraction from my normal blogginess was the big surprise party we've been planning for my Mom's 60th birthday, which took place this past Saturday. We had a turnout of almost 50 people, which is officially the biggest party we've ever had at our house. It went really well, but took a lot of planning and setting up by all of us: Dad, Laura, John and Mark all brought their "A" game in a big way. I'm pretty sure we managed to surprise Mom, at least mostly. She knew my grandparents were coming, and I think she may have figured out that we had invited a few more people than we had admitted to, like her brother & his family. But she was not expecting the deluge of well-wishers that we had lined up for her, and I know she was very pleasantly surprised to see everyone.

After all that hard work and the loads of fun we had at the party, we planned nothing for Sunday except relaxing & catching up on our TiVo'd programs. But alas, it seems the party gods demanded a sacrifice for blessing our party with so much good food & drink and great company. I awoke Sunday morning with what I believed to be a nasty cold, but have since discovered is actually an even nastier flu, complete with fever, chills and a bit of vomiting. And as of yesterday, the pandemic has spread to both my parents, as well. Somehow (miraculously) Mark has managed to avoid the plague that has been set upon us, at least so far. And believe me, I'm knocking on wood as I type this, 'cause the last thing we need is our only wage-earner (and my personal choice for Favorite Housemate) brought low for days by this miserable flu bug.

So I am currently in Day 4 of my illness, and it has yet to get any better. Some symptoms have come and gone, only to be replaced by others. But I'm hanging in there, and I'm sure I'll be back to my blogging soon. We're all pretty certain to miss Thanksgiving, though, which bites. I'll probably ship Mark off to his sister's house, so at least he can have a semi-normal holiday. He deserves much more than that, with all the extra hours he's been putting in lately. And who knows - maybe we'll have a big Thanksgiving-y meal here at home in a week or two, when everyone's had a chance to recover.

I have lots of photos and some video from the birthday party, which I plan to share here when I'm feeling a bit better. My personal favorite is the show all the kids put on for us - what a hoot! But it's a really long clip that will need some editing to upload, and I'm just not up for that yet. So, until I'm back in the blogging saddle, I leave you with this - a short video clip from Mom's party, primarily featuring my cousin's daughter Rebekah and her mad dancing skills:


Rebekah Shakes Her Booty from Barbara Raymond on Vimeo.