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So it\u2019s been a nice Easter Sunday, actually.\u00a0 I went to Easter Vigil last night, then, while the rest of the family was at mass, spent the morning making Easter Dinner, that is, lamb, our favorite green beans recipe, zopf (a German braided bread), and a prepackaged salad plus pineapple for good measure.\u00a0 The lamb itself turned out to have smelled better than it tasted, because, in my efforts to have the food ready right when my oldest got back from playing trumpet at mass, at 12:45, to maximize the afternoon family time, I put the lamb in too early, and it ended up well-done instead of the proper medium-rare.\u00a0 But it\u2019s all well and good because I hadn\u2019t made zopf in quite a while and we all really enjoyed it.\u00a0 (Is it \u201creal\u201d zopf?\u00a0 Dunno.\u00a0 At some point we concluded that any challah recipe, without the egg wash, would do the trick.\u00a0 I have seen variations with honey as the sweetener, and using butter instead of oil for the fat but this basic recipe came in the breadmaker recipe book and it works well for us.)<\/p>\n
And after eating, we all put our shorts on for the first time this year, gathered up backpacks with water bottles, and headed to the local forest preserve for a hike, with paths that were, yes, muddy, but not so horribly muddy as to be impassible, though we\u2019ll all have to give our shoes a bit of a scrub.\u00a0 Then I sent my husband and sons off to drop off the eldest at the Chicago Amtrak station; we were originally all going into town together with the plan to do some walking along the riverfront and\/or lakefront but I decided to send them off without me because \u2014 well, I need to get into shape, apparently, because I\u2019d now had enough hiking\/walking for the day.<\/p>\n
So that was nice, and a welcome break from the whole \u201cfix Mom and Dad\u201d business, which, to back up a bit, is still ongoing, and occupied the whole of our Thursday and Friday \u2014 driving into town, meeting with the social workers and doing some errands with my parents on Thursday, and having more conversations and doctor\u2019s appointments on Friday.\u00a0 Mom definitively has dementia but the cause is unknown; she\u2019ll need an MRI to see if she\u2019s had a stroke.\u00a0 Her uncontrolled diabetes is also a possible contributing factor, and the combination of uncontrolled diabetes and uncontrolled high blood pressure, as well as the more \u201cgeneric\u201d dementia that won\u2019t go away after she starts taking medication, means that she shouldn\u2019t be driving any longer, which can be managed through a combination of the services available on site at the retirement community (convenience store, restaurant, cafeteria, doctors\u2019 offices, pharmacy, etc.), shuttles to stores, the ferrying my nearby sister can do, and, as a final back-up, uber or the \u201ctaxi\u201d service provided by the CCRC.\u00a0 We also need to get her to accept wearing Depends, to accept showering more often and putting clean clothes on every day, and the aide that will now begin coming every day will have to monitor her medication as well as Dad\u2019s.<\/p>\n
And it will not come as a surprise that Mom is not happy about any of this.\u00a0 What is more difficult to manage is that Mom denies it.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing wrong with her, no reason not to drive, her memory is just fine, and so on.\u00a0 She seems to have reluctantly accepted that the aide is coming, whether she thinks it\u2019s necessary or not, and most of the time, she\u2019s too passive to get in the car anyway, but we\u2019ve got a long way to go.\u00a0 (The next phone call:\u00a0 \u201cwould you prefer to order groceries with me online, or to have Sis take you the store?\u201d)\u00a0 What\u2019s more, the staff is expecting us to have figured out how to get her to comply with instructions to be cleaner (yes, so that neither the apartment nor she herself disturbs the other residents by being smelly), and we\u2019re just trying to win one battle at a time.\u00a0 Oh, and on top of which, our initial reaction to the expanded aide visits had been, \u201cthat\u2019s a rip-off; there\u2019s no way they need that much\u201d and we\u2019re now focused more on trying in some way to get our money\u2019s worth, but in the back of our mind there is the concern that if we don\u2019t solve the hygiene issue soon the staff will deem them \u201cnoncompliant\u201d and then we\u2019ll have a problem.<\/p>\n
On the bright side, we did leave the boys home (now 12 & 16) by themselves overnight and they managed to behave themselves adequately, cooking a simple dinner for themselves, going to the library together on Friday and then going to church (as instructed), and causing no damage so far as we could tell.\u00a0 So there\u2019s that.<\/p>\n
Anyway, that\u2019s where we are right now, though I should also add that I was bummed about missing church on Good Friday, and I didn\u2019t really do anything special for Lent but just had the ongoing feeling that dealing with Mom & Dad was Lent-y enough.\u00a0 Have we turned a corner with this latest visit?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know, but I\u2019m going to try to convince myself of the fact.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So it\u2019s been a nice Easter Sunday, actually.\u00a0 I went to Easter Vigil last night, then, while the rest of the family was at mass, spent the morning making Easter Dinner, that is, lamb, our favorite green beans recipe, zopf (a German braided bread), and a prepackaged salad plus pineapple for good measure.\u00a0 The lamb […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[58],"class_list":["post-13597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-family"],"yoast_head":"\n