Mother’s Day: Ways to Show Your Mom You Care
With Mother’s Day around the corner, it’s time to consider how you can support your own mom. As a holiday, more attention is usually given to moms of youngsters, but Mother’s Day represents a terrific opportunity to think of your mom and your grandmother, aunt or other special lady in your life.
Plan Something Special
One of the best ways to take care of an aging parent is to simply carve out time for them. Life, in general, is busy, and it’s always easy to push stuff off until next week. With Mother’s Day approaching, there’s no time like the present to spend some quality time together. Plan an activity with low physical and stress demands. Consider taking your mom out to brunch, a movie, to get a pedicure, or even to play bingo. While the best gift is time itself, a relaxing afternoon with an activity is also a plus.
Help Mom Out
If a day on the town, isn’t your cup of tea, consider the gift of helping your mom out at home. While many parents are too proud to ask for, or even, accept help, consider offering some less invasive assistance. Options include gardening or yard work, sending over home cooked meals, helping out with folding laundry, or doing the dishes, etc. The point is to take reduce the burden of daily housework from your aging parent. If they welcome the support, it may be time to make a more permanent arrangement, which could be more of a commitment from you or hiring a service to come on a regular basis.
Savor the Memories
If you are looking for a more sentimental way to connect with your mom, consider transferring old movies, slides, or photos to a digital format. If you can manage to do this in secret, it would make for a great surprise! You could host a viewing night with pizza, popcorn, and/or ice cream to reveal the photos/movies in their new digital format. Not only is this a great way to connect with your parent, but it’s also a fun way to show your family’s fond memories to your children or nieces/nephews.
Gift Ideas
If you are still looking to spoil your mom with an actual gift, consider something practical. Tablets represent a great gift to provide your mom with an easy-to-read screen for Internet usage! Other fun options include a pressure cooker/instant pot that cooks meals in less than 30 minutes, a digital picture frame to rotate through photos, and Sudoku or adult coloring books. A sweet treat could also be a nice gift.
The takeaway: prioritize time over gifts. Spend some time with your loved one and make a day of it!
From all of us at Chouchani, Sayegh and Robinson MD, we hope that all of the mothers that we care for have a very happy Mother’s Day!
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