Happy Mother's Day!

It's a bittersweet one for me, the first one that my mom is not in her home and the first time my oldest son is not home for Mother's day.   So I am going to try my best not to focus on the bitter, but focus on the sweet.

The now one of a kind dress.

We had straps put on, the bodice taken up to fit (kind of, it's still a bit big) and a blue underskirt sewn underneath so now it has 8 skirts.  It's heavy, but I think it turned out very pretty.  The blue and silver makes me think of Frozen, maybe because we've watched it about 4 times this week.  :-) 

Art stuff.

For the first 2, I was playing with the gray markers.  I never use them, so I have a bunch.  It was fun making the pictures in gray scale. 

Nothing much.

I didn't do much of anything today,  a  little work a bit  of nagging about school, a little cooking , a tiny bit of cleaning...so here are some pictures  of the dog for no particular reason except that she is cute.

Okay, day one.

Mom slept last night at the new assisted living/memory care facility and I called the nurse this morning to ask how she had done.  When I called, she was talking and laughing with a group of women over breakfast, so good news.  The night shift also reported that she had slept reasonably well.  It's a small victory, and I expect that when I go visit, she will tell me to take her home, but for today, just today, I am going to take this small victory and treasure it.

At one point yesterday, I was able to appreciate the fun-ness of my kids and my husband.  We were talking about my excessive art journaling which is therapeutic to me.  The worse everything gets, the more I need a sketchbook and markers in my hands.  We were talking about this and my family took a moment to be thankful, that I didn't take up drinking or drugs or playing the drums or bagpipes.  :-)

Yes, I have been art journaling this awful week, whenever I get a minute.  It helps.

Today.

We are moving mom to a memory care facility.  I think it is probably the best in the state and it is certainly the best we can barely afford (for a while).  We will have to be scrambling to sell her house and things to try and come up with money for the long term.  I pray that the long term will bring more happiness, peace and less anxiety into mom's life. 

Bad to worse.

Things with my mom's situation have gone from bad to way worse and we are moving her on Monday.  Please pray for our family.  Thanks.

Getting on with it.

So after I curled up in the fetal position for a while and cried, I got up and started trying to find a new place for mom.  As a homeschooler, I am in the very fortunate position to be in a huge email group with other homeschoolers in the state.  I asked for suggestions and got 6 different suggestions of memory care facilities.  I contacted them all through their web sites yesterday and asked for them to call me.  A couple of them did and I have appointments to tour them today.  I feel better.  You have to mourn and then you have to get up and cope.  That's all there is to it.  The one lady I talked to on the phone was very comforting and talking to her made me feel better yesterday.  I am hopeful that the facility that she runs is a good one and that mom could be happy there.  I talked to her about management of behaviors enough to feel that she knows how to handle mom, now I will need to see how well the rest of the staff and the facility look.  We may be moving mom again very soon.  I don't know how I feel about that.  The place she is in is the kind of place we thought we wanted, a family atmosphere, but once your loved one is in a place like that, it's kind of awkward walking into someone else's home ... I don't know how to describe it.  It's just been hard and maybe this new place, though farther away, will be better.  I pray it will.

While doing all this yesterday, I was also working and training for work.  There was a deadline of getting all the training done by 04/30/2014 and that made me have to squeeze quite a bit of it in.  I had a webinar and some Ted talks to watch and a couple of quizzes, one on HIPAA and one on mistakes to complete.  It was funny because the first quiz, the one on HIPAA, they had told us that there was a quiz and we had 3 attempts to pass it and if we didn't pass it, to call human resources ... all that scary stuff, so I took 7 pages of notes during the webinar, only to find that the quiz was 13 questions long and easy-peasy, so easy I could have answered it without even watching the webinar.
For the second quiz, I didn't take any notes, I just paid careful attention while art journaling and hoped I would be prepared for that quiz ....  It had 1 question on it "I watched the videos on mistakes."  Yes/No.  I wonder if anyone flunks that one?

The kids are doing fine, with everything I guess.  They are both reading a lot this week since we have a recent trip to the library, drawing, knitting, crocheting, all the stuff they have been grounded from for the last few weeks a lot of the time.  May is here and the school year is drawing to a close.

I guess I'd better start coping with today.

Have a good one folks!