Day 40: The Importance of Family

It appears that the part of my mom’s brain that realizes she needs some assistance and that it might actually be nice to be near family is winning. Much to my surprise, she seems committed to moving.

We spent much of the day planning for the move. First, the first time she didn’t seem to have any reservations about moving. She wasn’t on the brink of being upset when we talked about selling the house and the other next steps. She seemed relieved to have arrived at this decision. I am glad and thankful that she is making this decision on her own.

At lunch, the boys were in one of those moods where they are super silly and won’t listen. It ended up costing them a planned trip to Chuck E. Cheese. It was replaced with a full family effort to wash off the bugs accumulated in 7,000 miles of driving since the first week of July when I purchased the RV. In one of those ironic twists in life, I think everyone — my mom, Will, Lucas, and definitely me — had more fun doing this together than we would have had if we went to the arcade. We joked around. Lucas, our new RV detailing expert, explained to nanny how wash an RV. It was nice to just have a regular family day doing something routine. It reminded me of all the days my brother and I and our parents spent washing their RV after a long summer trip.

Late afternoon we went to my cousin Tim’s house for pizza. With all my movement around the country and Tim’s travel around the world (he was a Captain in the Navy), we have not seen much of each other outside of funerals over the last several decades. After retiring from the Navy, he moved back to Youngstown and now lives 5 minutes down the street from my mom. It has given us the chance to grab dinner together occasionally. My cousin TK and his wife also joined us. It was fun to recollect old stories and hear about their lives. We talked of planning a family reunion next summer, possibly at the campground in Virginia that we all went to on a big family summer vacation when we were kids.