Well, the holiday is over for me, and work starts again with Ray back home again. The Tuesday shower nurse has come and gone and Ray went straight out to sit on the verandah. All is well in his world when he is out there doing his word puzzles. I guess it is the one thing he really misses when he is away from home.

Yesterday I finished putting up the last of the Christmas decorations before going and picking him up. As usual the bag was only half packed, clean clothes among the dirty ones as he had packed the bag himself. It is good he has the motivation sometimes to do something for himself. I'm not knocking that, just wish the aides would bag the dirty clothes first.

We came home and had some lunch and changed into our Lions Club tee shirts as we were on ticket selling in the afternoon. It is good Ray still gets some "service hours" up by seling tickets. This has been a good year for sales as a lot of people indulge in dreaming they will be the winner of the stocking - imagine that - $4000 worth of gifts and vouchers beiing delivered on the afternoon of Christmas Eve! What a difference that will make to the winner's Christmas!!

I remember when I had Mum living with me and we would come home from a time away, as we drew into the driveway the weight of the world would settle back on my shoulders. That is how I felt this morning when I woke up. Oh dear, Ray is here. It is not that I don't love him to bits, I do, but it is taking up the nursing, cleaning, cooking etc all the small parts that together make up the caregiver role.

We went into the hospital where my little friend Beryl is to see how she was going and take a small Christmas present to her. She is scheduled to go into the equivalent of a SNF for two weeks while everyone decides if there is any way she can come back home. A certain amount of care would be government subsidised so she could get up to three visits a day from the palliative care team, up to five days a week. But whether that is enough care to enable her to stay home as seriously ill as she is I don't know.

Ageing , particularly if you become ill, for an elderly or frail person who lives alone is a real problem here. The decisions you have to make as to whether you can remain in your own home or not are based on the fact that "care will be provided" and the reality of that is often not what you expect at all. With our experience of the shower nurses twice a week plus the shower and two hours respite on Friday I know how good and less reliable carers can work from the same team. The reality is that reliability, consistency and conscientious performance of the care depends on a lot of good will on both sides. I would rate a couple of our carers as the best, a couple of others as good and a couple of others well.... I guess they just fill in their hours each week.

Our Christmas day is almost organized. Last night Trev did a typical pre-Christmas job - he cleaned out the freezer while searching for a missing piece of roasting pork. You all know that: "it is in here somewhere" situation when you have an old chest freezer with food inside jumbled in no particular order? Well we have one of those. And to find anything you are looking for is an amazing achievement. But Trev did it and now all the meats we will cook on Christmas Eve are neatly stacked where we can see them. I have bought some of the side dishes, the last of those will be purchased tomorrow, fresh salad greens, tomatoes etc. and heaps of fresh summer fruits. The salads will be made up Christmas morning, hopefully before church time and then it just all needs to be assembled when we get home. Thank goodness this is a quiet Christmas for us.

And so Ray and I need to get used to each other again. It seems I had forgotten a lot in two week on how to handle a person with memory problems. From a fiasco this morning I remembered I have to tell him what to do simply, repeatedly and in such a way that he will actually do it. Then we will get where we are going without a wife who is flustered and muttering wildly and a sulky husband who is determined to be unco-operative. It is all in the way you handle the situation and the tried and true methods work best - keep it simple sweetheart and one step at a time.