A Night Out on the Town... Wednesday, August 17

43 years, that’s how long my parents have been married.

47 years marks how long they’ve been a couple and today marked their wedding anniversary.

Snickers is always claiming I’m stubborn but boy am I my mother’s daughter. If I’m supposedly so stubborn than she’s the queen of stubbornness. Despite her being all cooped up in a hospital, restricted to a hospital bed and dependent on others to do things that were once so easily done without ease, like sit up or comb her hair, she insisted we all go out to celebrate today.

Once my mother has an idea in her head it’s stuck and the only way to get it out of her head is to agree to it and do it, so that’s exactly what happened tonight. We went out to celebrate my parents 43 wedding anniversary.

And what a celebration it was… talk about mad prepping needed. Nurses were involved not only with getting my mom physically ready for the dinner but with picking out which restaurant to go to. My mom called to make the reservations. The doctor was involved with giving up instructions about the wheelchair and “what if” situations, I was in charge of bringing in dresses, shoes, and jewelry from home for my mother to pick from, my oldest brother and his wife had to make the journey down and arrange for their little girls to be looked after. My other brother was in charge of dealing with the taxi arrangements and wheelchair and my dad functioned as the coordinator connecting us all.

The dinner was a success… a huge success.

And for those couple of hours we had successfully escaped the hospital, had forgotten all about the heartbreaking situation our family has been consumed by, and were happy.