Happy 245th birthday USA!
Does it make me old if I can remember our 200th birthday, America’s Bicentennial? It doesn’t seem that long ago, either.
Summer is officially here, but M continues to wear jeans and a zip-up hoodie to his “work” (the memory-care daycare center) every day. As long as he’s comfortable, it doesn’t matter to me, but I keep thinking he must be getting hot during the day.
We enjoyed a happy holiday weekend. Very uneventful, which was good, since he didn’t go to “work” for three days. There was a music concert in the park around the corner from our house on Friday night and, at first, M said he didn’t want to go. I didn’t push and started to settle in for a night in front of the TV. But something made me change my mind and I told M to get himself together and we were going to the park.
I knew there would be food trucks there, but I also knew he wouldn’t have the patience to wait for food from them, so I ordered pizza from the local shop in town. No problem – it was ready by the time we were and we had a piping hot pizza to enjoy as we listened to the music. The area in front of the stage was PACKED, but we set up our chairs behind the stage, in the shade and it was great. We didn’t really care about seeing the band – we just wanted to hear the music and we had a wonderful time people-watching and enjoying our pizza!
The rest of the weekend was quiet – a cookout and fireworks with our Older Son and his family, hanging around the house and getting laundry done. M did really well – staying focused and engaged for the most part, except for late Monday afternoon. I was upstairs, cleaning the counter and sink in the bathroom, and he came in and asked, “Sometimes I don’t hear you, do I?”
Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I’ve only been saying this for YEARS! Yes – there are many times you don’t hear me!
But, as soon as I said that, you could tell it hurt his feelings. Sigh. Come on – you asked!
Then, he wanted to ask me about something, but couldn’t tell me what it was he wanted to know. “A thing, some thing, that thing . . . “ Finally, I knew my ‘cleaning the bathroom’ time was over and we went downstairs together to figure out what the “thing” was.
Turns out, it was a picture frame – one for each of our sons – that has a photo of them for every year they were in school, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. M was very agitated and wanted to know why he wasn’t in any of those pictures.
You have GOT to be kidding me.
He had decided that, since he wasn’t in any of those photos, that I was trying to get rid of him. I showed him a handful of pictures that DID have him in them – then I looked at the clock. It was 5:30 pm. I wasn’t hungry yet, but I wondered if he was hungry or thirsty and that was causing all this angst.
PB&J to the rescue! I whipped together a sandwich so fast, it would make your head spin . . . added some chips and a HUGE peach sparkling water (his favorite) and suddenly all was right with the world again. I don’t know that this remedy will work all the time, but I think I might have hit on something.
There are so many heart wrenching moments caring for a loved spouse with dementia. This was one of them. I get it.
Mine asked me one day if I was going to send him to the nursery. The nursery? Then it clicked: memory care=nursery in his mind. (He used to work in pediatrics…). The nursery…it made me so sad.
This reminds me of how much my husband seems now like my son (relationship wise, not behavior wise) versus B.D. (before diagnosis). He talks and acts either cognitively like a child or an elderly man, doesn’t seem to be an in between. It is sad, for sure. But you’re right, there can be surprising ways to resolve situations with early onset Alzheimer’s, right? I’m glad for those.