{"id":175434,"date":"2026-02-12T20:02:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T20:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/175434\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T20:02:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T20:02:08","slug":"side-by-side-respite-ministry-celebrates-mardi-gras-in-long-beach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/175434\/","title":{"rendered":"Side-By-Side Respite Ministry celebrates Mardi Gras in Long Beach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>LONG BEACH, Miss. (WXXV) \u2014 First Methodist Church of Long Beach is celebrating Mardi Gras with their Side-By-Side Respite Ministry!<\/p>\n<p>The program provides engaging activities for those with dementia, Alzheimer\u2019s, traumatic brain injuries, and memory loss.<\/p>\n<p>From 10 am to 2 pm every Wednesday, attendees enjoy games, dancing, music, food and themed activities. This week, of course, was Mardi Gras week\u2026 which wouldn\u2019t be complete without a parade, second line, and home made king cake.<\/p>\n<p>The free program that started three years ago with only three \u201cfriends\u201d ,as the volunteers like to call them, has continuously grown, and is now supporting around 8-15 people per week.<\/p>\n<p>Many participants return every Wednesday and with smiles lighting up every face in the room, its clear they enjoy the activities<\/p>\n<p>They\u2019re always looking for new friends to join the program.\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONG BEACH, Miss. (WXXV) \u2014 First Methodist Church of Long Beach is celebrating Mardi Gras with their Side-By-Side&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175435,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[131,133,132],"class_list":{"0":"post-175434","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-long-beach","8":"tag-long-beach","9":"tag-long-beach-headlines","10":"tag-long-beach-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}