Sunday, October 24, 2010

Mom Has Been Busy

I have not written for months because my mom has been ultra busy. The only thing that can slow my mom down is for her to get sick. It is unusual for her to be ill and when she does, it generally hits her hard. She came down with the flu over a week ago and she is still suffering from it. Despite her high pain tolerance, she takes Tylenol everyday to cope with bone and muscle aching. Her throat feels raw and she has taken more lozenges this past week than her entire life time. As she gets better gradually, the bug is going around in our household. Both Peter and Grandma are not feeling well. Hopefully, Adelaide, Emily and myself can remain healthy.

My mom went to Vancouver in July to attend a cousin's wedding. She stayed at Emily and Peter's apartment to help with baby care and packing. Initially, the packing was extremely organized and donation runs helped in reducing the moving load. As time ran out, everything went into boxes for moving. Under Peter's supervision, box contents were to be organized and not random. Nonetheless, finding things can still be a challenge at times. They rented a big U-Haul truck and moved back to Edmonton at the end of August.

When our family moved from the westend home to Millwoods and then from Millwoods to our current address, the experience was similar to Emily's move . . . only it was much, much worse. My mom did make attempts to sort our belongings. She couldn't possibly cope with the workload, so there were random stuffs packed in same box and there were "untoouched" boxes being moved from one location to the other. Having been in our home for over a decade, there has been more additions to our garage/basement when other extended family members moved and needed storage space.

Emily and Peter's moving home marked the beginning of a frenzy of cleaning house, IKEA trips for shelving units, organizing accumulated messes, and donation/ECO station runs. The job is endless and work is still in progress. My mom appreciates Emily and Peter's help in this horrendous task of getting our home in order. A lot more work is needed to be done yet.