Tuesday

They say there is a sun, bright as ever, behind the clouds. If that's so, then it surely is doing a good job of concealing its existence. They say:  just you wait! It will come out again. I look at the weather maps: not today it wont. Not tomorrow or the next day, or the next day, or the day after. Cloudy and cold, cloudy and cold, cloudy and cold.

Fine, I'll just stay indoors. (After the animal feed.)

Breakfast.






We are about to enter Act III of my mom's transition. You could say Act I was the stroke and the resultant hospital and Rehab Nursing Home stay. Act II was the application for long term care and the move-out. Act III is going to be the new normal for her (and thus for me): working with a Managed Care Organization ("MCO") in an Assisted Living Residence. But today I am in a do-nothing state. I have to wait to be contacted  by the MCO. We'll meet, evaluate, select, apply and eventually move my mom into her new place. But for now, I have to do nothing.

I love having the obligation of doing nothing! Love, love, love it! I fritter the morning on reading this, answering that, thinking about the other. It's all very wonderful.

And the afternoon is good as well: I pick up the kids at school...

It can be a challenge to have them both here every day. I used to be able to stock the farmhouse with toys that I knew would appeal to Snowdrop. Books that we could read together. Her place space wasn't large, but we found ways to be expansive.

When Sparrow started school and thus joined us at the farmhouse, I tried to imagine how this small play space could accommodate both, given that they are 3.5 years apart in age. The complicated tiny Lego building projects were put behind a gate. Duplo Legos which target the  2- 5 age bracket were left out for Sparrow. I thought I would be straddling the two spaces.

It didn't work out that way. Snowdrop lost all interest in building Lego sets. The age requirement for them would be 7+ and so she needed a lot of help. I can't do that when little Sparrow is here.

Snowdrop also lost interest in playing with her babies. They were a vehicle for her storytelling, but such stories involved my participation and somehow my inattention now, with an eye turned more toward Sparrow's safety, caused these games to fizzle. Most often the babies are ignored.

Both kids want to play in each others space. He wants to be where she is, and on most days, she wants to be where he and I are. This leaves us with basically three activities and these days, we mostly run through two of the three.

The first is reading. That does not change. Sparrow sits with us as we plow through chapter books. After a while he gets restless and brings me his little books. I pause and we read his little books. Then return to the chapter one for Snowdrop, only to be interrupted again a few minutes later with a little one. We can do this, going back and forth for a good while.






The second surefire is art work: both kids like it, though Sparrow still does very basic scribbles and so after a while he'll look for a greater challenge. Like stacking markers, or taking caps off of them and mixing them up. My role is to make sure he doesn't start painting the walls.

The third -- the Duplo little kid Legos. Snowdrop has found them to be good tools for story telling and Sparrow loves being able to play with the same toy as his sister, no restrictions, no barriers.






(with a break for cat watching by Sparrow...)






Evening. No moon, no stars. We watch serious documentaries. But, there is popcorn. And there are twinkly lights. And blooming potted orchids. And reheated vegetable soup. Not bad, eh? No, not bad at all!