Things have been busy around here.

[b]The Party[/b]

Back in November, we threw a surprise birthday party for my Mom. She was turning 75 this year. The plan was to throw the party in Massachusetts the weekend after her birthday. Robyn and I (but mostly Robyn as she created the invitations and took care of the list and dealing with the restaurant, etc – THANK YOU, BABE!) have been planning this since late summer and it was quite a challenge. It’s always tough to plan a long-distance party, but it was more difficult because I didn’t[readmore] have the addresses or contact information for the majority of my cousins and family who would be invited. Since moving to NJ more than 14 years ago, I have hardly seen anyone outside of my immediate family except for the rare (thankfully!) funeral so I contacted my cousin Doris and my Aunt Kay who’s email addresses I pulled from one of my mom’s forwarded emails. With their help, we were able to put together a list of family and friends to invite. The many on-line directories were very helpful in finding and verifying addresses and the invitations were sent with directions to RSVP.

A week before the party, my mom called (this is very unusual in itself!) and said that she was in the emergency room. She had not been feeling well for several days and had asked my cousin to bring her because she thought that she had pneumonia. My mom’s pretty tough when it comes to not feeling well, but when the pneumonia started to affect her breathing, she must have gotten quite scared. She was diagnosed with [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_obstructive_pulmonary_disease]COPD[/url] in 1991 and it’s really only in recent years that it’s begun to affect her. I’m glad she went because the docs confirmed that she had pneumonia and wanted to keep here in the hospital for several days to administer antibiotics and monitor her O2 levels. Robyn and I were not quite sure what to do at this point because if she wasn’t feeling better we would have to cancel or postpone the party in time to get in touch with everyone and let them know. Things were shakey for a few days, but my mom was discharged on Tuesday and since she was sounding so much better, we decided to go ahead.

We drove up to MA on a rainy Friday afternoon, checked into our hotel and then had dinner at my sister’s house. The next day, the party went off without a problem and my mom was COMPLETELY surprised. In fact, she didn’t even notice us or our kids until after everyone yelled “Surprise! Happy Birthday!” so I think we caught her completely off guard. I was really happy to have been able to put the party together. I found out a few days later that this was the very first birthday party that my mother had ever had![/readmore]