As I said a while back ...

I have a difficult time not titling every single blog post for this year "hanging in there" because that is what I am doing.  It's been a tough year.  Let me refresh you if you haven't been reading long.  At the beginning of 2014, my mom was in a local assisted living and had only been there a few weeks.  She was not, not, not, not happy.  During January, we made the decision to move her to a licensed family home with a lady who took care of 3 Alzheimers patients with the hopes that the smaller, family style environment, would allow her to feel more at home and allow her to bond with the other ladies.  This did not go well.  She was not happy but we tried to give it some time, in the hopes that she would settle in.

Meanwhile, I lost my job and had to scramble to get another one and my husband got a different job, which was actually a promotion, but required him to be gone all of the time, I started having some health problems and had to quit volunteering with the babies in the NICU.  :-(     (Also, I forgot to mention that in the middle of the awful, snowy winter, the pipes in mom's house burst and we had to go over there and shovel ice out of the floor.  Fun times.)  After I settled into my new job a little bit (there as a LOT of training and adjusting), I was able to look at Mom's situation and realized that we needed to move her again.  This was something we had wanted to avoid because she lost so much ground, memory/functioning-wise with each move.  I started looking for another placement, calling basically every family home in the state, then moving on to assisted living facilities with memory care units.  While this was ongoing, one day we got a call from adult protective services indicating that our mom may have been hurt in the family care home.  :-(   This was horrible.  I can't even think about someone hurting my poor sweet mom.  So over the weekend, in May, we moved her to another facility; this time, a good one, though more expensive than we would have liked.  We were fortunate that they were able to take her on such short notice, from Thursday to Monday.  Right about this time, some of my family members invited me to a party, then uninvited me, told me not to come and lied to me about the reasons why and another member of the community started spreading nasty rumors about me and my brother, which were unfounded, but pretty heartbreaking.

My health problems were ongoing, but I had to keep cancelling my own appointments because of some crisis with mom.  The second weekend in May, my son had a car accident in Mississippi, in my mom's car that he had borrowed when his broke down (another story) and we found out that with mom's 3 moves in 6 months, her car insurance had expired.  So he had an uninsured accident,  He had to go to court in July, in Mississippi (9 hours away) and we had to pay about 300 dollars in court costs and fines and later found out that the amount we owed for that accident, to pay for the other person's car, was almost 7000 dollars.   In June, I was finally able to get to the doctor.  In July, my own car broke down.  In August, my son moved back to Mississippi to go back to school and I had to get intravenous iron transfusions to deal with my marked anemia that had made me almost completely unable to walk.   We started homeschooling this fall with my daughter pretty much overseeing her brother's work, thank goodness.  In September, we started cleaning out my mom's house to sell it and in October we listed it with a realtor, a process that I have blogged about.  It's been heartbreaking for me to sell the home I grew up in.  Also, in October, our dog died.

So guess what we are doing right now?  Hanging in there.  It's all we can do.  We're trying to adjust to the new normal and trying to feel hopeful. My anemia has been treated and I am feeling better. Mom's doing better at this new place, but if we don't sell the house, we will have to move her out of there, so that is worrisome.  I'm driving an hour each way to visit her in the junky car I have to drive and trying to be thankful that I even have that.  We've been doing art journaling, knitting, crocheting, watching TV, reading, playing games, spending time with friends and trying not to feel down or depressed, but I tell you what, I am looking forward to the end of 2014.  It's not been a fun year.

What does any of this have to do with homeschooling?  As usual, homeschooling makes dealing with all of these crises easier, not harder because we are able to be flexible and our 16 year old is available to help with things like packing up a house and shoveling ice out of someone's kitchen.  If anything, my kids have learned to pitch in when there is a crisis, keep on keeping on and well, you know.

 
I thank God for those people in my life who help me with everything, laugh and cry with me and help me, every few months, to pick up a bunch of things and move them, those people who invite me to things and really want me to come, people who defend me and stand with me, kill the spiders and bury the dogs.