Since my mom retired in mid October, I told myself I wanted to do something with her OUTSIDE of the house at least once a month. My mom has been in mourning since her husband passed away, and for the most part has continued working until her retirement. She rarely steps out of the house unless it's for running her errands. I felt it was important for her to continue to live her life during this transition which meant I needed her to look forward to something. Sometimes her depression gets the best of her and she would cancel on me at the last minute due to bad weather conditions, feeling tired, or whatever excuse she would make up. I knew on my end I didn't want to push her into doing something she wasn't ready to do. I had a scheduled day off from work on the last Friday of December. When I spoke to her the night before, I had suggested we do something concerning the holidays before all the festivities would be taken down. I cannot go over her place too long due to her dog, so she has to work with me whether she likes it or not. I wanted to checkout the Museum of Science and Industry to look at the Christmas trees around the world exhibit. Automatically she brought up how cold it might be, and of course, I debated back that we are in winter after all and that's expected. She didn't seem to budge so I dropped it.
In the morning I enjoyed watching the news and wanted to finish up my last book I was reading for the year, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People"; a self-help book I got off of Amazon. I figured it would be a great way to for me to prepare for 2017, and I was down to the last chapter. Sure enough, around 11am she called me out the blue. "You know, I took Lucky out for a walk and it didn't seem that cold out". It looks like my mom wanted to step out after all. Unfortunately we went back and forth on the phone, and concluded that heading to Hyde Park to the Museum of Science and Industry was not going to work for us. We still had to get ready and meet up somewhere since we both don't have a car. If we wanted to head there, we should have left much earlier. I had a back up plan. I told her we could head down to Millennium Park to watch the ice skating rink and she agreed.
We got downtown around 2pm and made our way there. But since we were passing State Street, we realized we did not get a chance to see the Christmas display at Macy's. We walked around the building to see the window displays and took pictures. We figured we could checkout what they had inside. It was nice looking around with my mom. She's worked in downtown all her life and loves the glitz and glamour of nice things. Even though she couldn't afford such stuff, it never stopped her from appreciating the finer things in life. We made our way to the Walnut room to checkout their tree, but the line was too long for us to be seated for lunch. We kept on going.
We made it to Millennium Park and watched the people ice skate for some time. My mom wasn't aware of the skating rink there, so that's why I took her so she could become familiar with it. She was having a good time. The line to have lunch at the Park Grill was short, so we decided to have lunch there.
I realized we were doing good with time and thought maybe we could catch a movie. During Christmas Eve, my mom had mentioned how she wanted to see Lion with Dev Patel. I was surprised she even knew about such a film, but she claimed she saw something on tv about it. My mom is not the artsy film type. When her husband was alive, he was mostly into blockbuster movies and that's what they would see. To have her tell me she wanted to see this type of movie surprised me. But I wanted to make her happy, so I looked up the movie times and found one for 5:30pm at the AMC at Streeterville. She seemed glad we were going.
Off we went to the show. It was an amazing film, and it haunted me for days afterwards. There is an Oscar buzz and I hope they get the nominations in. Lion is based off a true story about a little boy that got lost from his older brother in India at a train station. My mom claims when she was a little girl back in Guatemala, her and her younger brother would sometimes roam the streets at such a young age. I often wonder how she randomly remember such times now that she's older.
I cried a lot during the movie and so did she. I felt that it brought us closer. At one point as we were having lunch, my mom said to me out of the blue "Thank you nena." It was nice...
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| I can't believe Tom Brady is going to the Super Bowl again! |
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| Pretty tree at the Walnut Room |
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| Goofing off at Macy's |
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| We got a chance to see people ice skate at Millennium Park... |
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| I always order crab cakes whenever it's on a menu! |
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| My wooden Santas are watching me. lol |
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| Wore an old winter white flannel blazer that helped keep me warm that day. Perfect alternative to a thick sweater. |
