Should We Stay or Should We Go - Our Travel Journal

  Happy Canada Day! It’s July 1st, the day Canadians celebrate our beautiful country.  It’s also the beginning of a new Ultimate Blog Challenge month. For those unfamiliar with it, the challenge is simple: write and publish a blog post every day for the month. Thirty-one days, thirty-one posts. I've participated before with varying degrees of success. Sometimes I've made it all the way through, and other times life has had different plans. Either way, I always enjoy the challenge because it encourages me to write more consistently and finally tell some of the stories that have been sitting in my head waiting for their turn. This month my posts will be focused on a specific part of Canada. A couple of weeks ago, I returned from a two-week trip to Newfoundland with my two sisters and my cousin. It was a trip filled with laughter, long drives, incredible scenery, and enough stories to keep me writing for quite a while. So throughout July, I'll be sharing my thoughts and a...

Photo by Alicia Christin Gerald on Unsplash These are challenging times. For the past few years, my siblings and I have been on what feels like an assisted living merry-go-round with Mom. We tour residences. We talk finances. We start the intake process. We discuss what life might look like there. Then she changes her mind. "I'm not ready." And everything comes to a stop. This has happened several times since my dad passed away four years ago. The reality is that living alone has become increasingly difficult for her. There have been health issues, emergency room visits, struggles with eating properly, and a growing sense of loneliness. I also suspect she's dealing with some depression, although that's not something she talks about much. After the last time she backed out, my siblings and I decided to take assisted living off the table. We told Mom that we'd simply bring in services as she needed them—housekeeping, meals, and whatever else might help her stay ...