Last week, Lisa wrote a post going through her photos of Mays of years past, and I loved it so much that I wanted to do the same. May can be a really interesting month for me, as it’s typically the month I take my big annual vacation with my mom and it’s also my grandma’s birthday, so seeing the photos of me celebrating with her before she passed away in 2015 is really special. I’ll start with 2014!
May 2014
All of these photos make me so happy! This is Grandma and me on her 72nd birthday. I believe she was going through cancer treatment at this time (her chemo didn’t cause hair loss). I remember asking to take a photo with her, and her trying to refuse because she was still in her nightgown. I’m glad I forced her to take a photo anyway! The day after Grandma’s birthday, my mom and I left on a cruise! This was our fifth cruise together and we traveled to Key West and the Bahamas. Our time in Key West was fraught, as my mom fell and injured herself right after we got off the ship. But she got it together enough to enjoy a pub crawl!
May 2015
Oh, what a fun collection of pictures! My nephew, D., was born in February of 2015 and those baby snuggles (and silly picture-taking!) were the best. My grandma had another birthday (73!) and it’s hard to believe that she would pass away not even six months later. And Mom and I went on another cruise! Our 2015 cruise was one for the record books because Mom and I both sustained injuries on this cruise—she fell off a bike during our excursion in the Bahamas, and I broke my ankle during our excursion in Puerto Rico. Fun times, indeed!
May 2016
A more low-key May for me! I was living with my roommate, Bri, this year and I took the middle photo of her as she waited for our cookies to bake. I’ve always loved how impatient she is for sweets! 🙂 I also love this photo I took of Dutch. He used to fall asleep on me like this all the time and I would soak up the snuggles. Also this month, Mom and I did a really fun race called “ColorBuzz” where we went through all sorts of obstacles and got colored powder thrown on us. It was fun! And then afterward, we tried finding a Dairy Queen for ice cream and my GPS took us somewhere super isolated, and we both got creeped out and backtracked. We ended up getting McFlurries at the McDonald’s near me instead, haha.
May 2017
A trip to Puerto Rico was the highlight of May 2017. Mom and I stayed there for a little less than a week and tried to make the most of our stay. We did a walking tour of historic San Juan, went horseback riding, hiked to a waterfall, and spent time relaxing on a dog-friendly beach. It was such a lovely vacation!
May 2018
In May of 2018, Mom and I were back to what we do best: cruising! We took our 8th cruise together where we zip-lined in Honduras, rode horses in Belize, and sipped fruity drinks poolside in Puerto Rico. This was a fun cruise but I was in the midst of a severe depressive episode that I was trying not to acknowledge. I spent the entire cruise wishing for it to be over because I just wanted to be at home in my own bed. It was after this cruise and how unhappy I was even on what looked like a fun vacation that I got serious about finding a therapist.
May 2019
In May of this year, I did something I’ve never done before: traveled overseas! While I’ve been on so many cruises and seen a ton of the Caribbean and South America, I have never been to Europe, and my mom and I scored a great deal on flights to Ireland. We saw the Cliffs of Moher, explored Galway and Dublin, and experienced train travel for the first time. I learned a lot about my traveling style during this trip, mainly that I’d probably do better with a tour group and definitely need more breaks than other people. But it was still fun and I can’t wait to return to Europe—maybe in 2022?
May 2020
What a wild time May of 2020 was! It was just the second month of full lockdown and I was still nervously waiting to find out how much longer my company was going to let us work from home. I saw my mom for the first time in over a month on Mother’s Day, finally deciding that if I was going to survive COVID lockdown, she had to be in my bubble. I also saw my brother and nephews for the first time since February! (They also had to be part of my bubble.) As a single person, I just couldn’t be completely isolated. That would have been detrimental to my mental health.
May 2021
What a difference a year makes! This May, I celebrated being fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Book club has been back in action for a few months, I’m in the middle of planning a tropical vacation with my mom for August, and we welcomed a brand-new dachshund puppy into our family—my fur-sister, Lucy. Life isn’t quite back to normal, but it’s getting there.
Pick a year and tell me what you were doing in May of that year!
So glad you played along! This was a fun post for me to write and it was fun to read through your past Mays as I’ve been following along for all this time, so remembered a lot of these highlights! I am glad this May is much better than Mays past! It’s going to be a great summer! Can’t wait to hear more about the vacation you are planning!
My favorite May is definitely 2017 when we got married and went to Maui for our honeymoon! I don’t think that month could ever be topped!
What great photos!!! And such a fun recap of excellent memories. Like you, I was in Europe in May 2019! It was SO wonderful and I think back on that trip with SUCH fondness.
So much fun to look back over the years… the month of May seemed to hold a lot of good memories going back 🙂
Wonderful photos – thank you for sharing! I cannot get over how much you look like your mom and grandmother. Perhaps you don’t see it, but as someone who does not resemble her own family members, I do! 🙂
And I love seeing how frequently your mom appears in your “Mays”. It seems like a favorite travel month, for one thing, but you so clearly love spending time together. What a gift!