Mother’s Day 2024

Mother’s Day has been hard on me the last three years. I miss hearing from Joe on the phone….getting his funny card in the mail. Rich left Thursday night for Kansas City to move Lily out of the dorms. They then flew to Florida to spend Mother’s Day with Rich’s mom. His siblings were there as well as a niece and nephew, so there was a mini family reunion going on. Unfortunately, Rich’s mom has moderate to severe Alzheimer’s and doesn’t really know who anyone is. However, I am sure she enjoyed having a full house of people to entertain her. I am still in the throes of my EMT class…so I couldn’t go anywhere. When Rich realized that I would be alone for Mother’s Day, he made plans to have Tim fly in from San Diego for the weekend. He came in around 1 a.m. on Saturday morning and left around 6 p.m. Sunday evening, so it was a quick trip, but it was so nice to have him here!

I stayed up late to go pick him up from the airport. Luckily, that gave me no excuse whatsoever to not go out and photograph the northern lights Friday night. I chose to go to the city beach in Whitefish. Here are some of my photographs from my phone from that night:

The next day we went to Glacier National Park to walk around. Things are starting to open up in the park already. There was a line to get into the park and lots of people were there as well. It didn’t hurt that it was sunny, clear and 80 degrees outside. Here are a few photos from that:

We spent the later part of the day watching UFC fights together (we normally have to text each other each weekend during the fights, so it was fun to just watch them together), and we watched the Celtics beat the Cavs. So a great night! Tallinn got lots of extra attention and we were able to step outside the backdoor and take a few northern lights photos again Saturday night.

Sunday we went to Mass, then spent some time working out in the garage together. It was a very special treat to do pad drills with Tim. He is a very good instructor and it was nice to not just have to hit a heavy bag or a speed bag, but take instruction from someone holding focus mitts. Not quite the typical Mother’s Day that most moms would love, but it was perfect for me. He even got me a candle (which is hysterical) and a new jump rope! He swears by this jump rope and I have been having no luck finding one I like. They are NOT ALL THE SAME. Anyhow, used it this morning and he was right, I love it!

I got to talk to both Lily and Michelle on the phone and that made my day even better. Tim is safe back at his place now and Tallinn and I are enjoying some quiet time together. He is loving the warmer weather and I am loving the visits I am getting from the hummingbirds (who are not going to my feeder, but hanging out around my hanging plants.

I did want to mention that I had my 6 month scans done on Friday. The preliminary results were stability again and possibly some shrinkage. Either way, good news. I meet with my Mayo Clinic doctor via zoom next week for the results they see. They always re-read the scans as they know what they are looking for.

I am plugging away at my EMT class. I had a shift last week with the local ambulance service (and we received absolutely no calls – they called me a “white cloud”) and I have my second shift tomorrow. I will be doing on scene classroom work all weekend. So we are on our final big push, graduating in about 4 weeks. I am learning lots, but I am ready to be done with all the classwork and studying. They mentioned the first night of class that they hoped we had cleared our social calendar for the next 10 weeks because we would be eating, breathing, and sleeping EMT stuff. They were not wrong.