Halloween visit with mom

My mom loves Florida! In fact, she claims no desire to ever be in New England again, so we’re grateful that she lives is a senior facility with exceptional staff, where she loves the people and the activities that are customized for her. Although we’d like to see my mom more often, we only get to visit 3-4 times a year due to the distance (1500 miles/2400 km). We try to drive at least once a year which allows for an extended stay, a few stops along the way, as well as bringing along some music gear. Then, of course, we aim to pack all of her favorite things to do into that visit!

We got the checklist things out of the way on the first day – shopping, stocking up on a few essentials, loading up her freezer with home-made cookies, and fixing a couple of things that broke or wore out since our last visit. And we managed to have enough time left for my mom’s favorite food group – ice cream!

My mom loves to be outdoors so we strive to do something outside every day. She loves long walks, and the paths at Wickham Park are some of her faves. At nearly 90 years old, she power walks along the trails and we’re quite happy to be able to keep up with her. We were challenged to plan an appropriate outdoor activity for one day as the forecast called for 90F/32C most of the day. It might help to involve water, though she doesn’t like the beach. Ha! Truck wash! We spent a solid hour in a self-serve truck wash sparkling up our RV while enjoying getting lightly soaked and staying relatively cool. My mom, a bit of a cleaning freak, especially liked the automatic foaming brush.

Mom’s favorite restaurant is Subway. Yup, the sandwich shop. And there’s a shop conveniently located near our campground. As usual, we did take-out and ate at camp. One day, we offered her home-made peanut butter sandwiches. Her eyes lit up! (My mom, my late dad, my youngest niece and I all seem to have decided that a jar of peanut butter is a convenient, single-serving size.) For the rest of the week, we drove past the Subway, straight to camp, and we made ourselves the awesomest fantasy PBJs!

At my mom’s residence, they go all out to celebrate holidays, with special food, decorations, parties and music. Our visit coincided with their Halloween party, the theme for which was steampunk. With help from the staff, my mom and I developed a costume idea, located my new favorite thrift store, and bought the essential elements to get her all steampunked up, including a creative DIY steampunk choker.

For extra fun, TheDestinators (that’s us) were the band for the party! Of course, we used a custom band name for this special event – Theresa’s Kids. It was the first time my mom has heard Doug and me play. We searched through our list of tunes for songs my mom and other residents of her generation might know and/or enjoy. We had already been informed by my mom that anything from Elvis would be appreciated and she specifically requested The Wonder of You, so we learned that. Their other 3 favorite songs from our setlist seemed to be Country Roads, The Gambler, Can’t Help Falling in Love (Elvis!) and He’ll Have to Go. The party featured pumpkin beer, Oreo/pretzel spiders, and cupcakes. Yowza!

For anyone who’s interested, more visit with mom pix…