If you scroll waaaay back on this blog you’ll find posts from holidays in Ithaca.  Mum and Dad have been going for 17 years.  Sometimes I tagged along, sometimes we all did.

We are lucky in some ways that the rapid changes in our family gave us enough time to realise one family holiday in Ithaca was a now or never opportunity.

I admit, I thought it was daft.  My sisters convinced us all.  So a couple of weeks ago all 10 of us: Mum, Dad, me, Mr R, Sister 1 her husband and Little Pea, and Sister 2, her partner and Little Wisp all got on a plane and went back to the Greek island we all know so well.

As we landed Mum told us it was the best holiday ever and her favourite bit had been the dancing.  We had to tell her we had just landed…In Greece. 🤦🏼‍♀️. I think that set the tone for the week.

Highlights included:

• Mum getting the giggles a number of times
• Discovering Dad couldn’t manage the walk from the hotel to the restaurant because of his breathing problems so borrowing a wheelchair (not a simple task on an island 117.8 km²)
• Realising the wheelchair had no footplates and that holding his feet in the air for the duration was as tricky as breathing
• Finding three alternatives to footplates, with varying degrees of success
• Attempting to reteach mum the word ‘fish’ and resorting to actions instead

All this is on this two minutes of video which I hopes makes you smile half as much as it did me.

We also discovered that while mum can’t remember something in the last five minutes (the word ‘fish’ for example 😬), she can remember incidents and places and walks going back 15 years in a fair bit of detail.

There were a few challenges.  There were a few moments of insight I’d not had into the future which were a bit sad, there were some gritted teeth, but mostly there were smiles and laughter.

And I think once we’d actually had the holiday, Mum enjoyed it even more than she had first thought.  I’m pretty sure there was no dancing though 😉