The harder you work the luckier you get. I don’t know who wrote that but it’s true, whether you are a young family, an old couple or a middle aged combination of parents and grown children there is always a lot of work to do in any household.

It is Spring>Summer>Christmas season here. We don’t have Thanksgiving so as soon as our Labor Day weekend is over (second weekend in October) everyone starts planning for summer. This year it has been a little slow coming but the cicadas are singing today and the birds are playing chasing games so I guess that means it is Spring and Summer is on it’s way. Yahooooo!

On Saturday I did a lot of gardening. The back yard was looking weedy and seedy (no winter snow to kill off the weeds) and so I tackled it as much as I could, weeding and watering and moving plants in their pots so they showed to their best advantage. I finally got a bromeliad flowering that isn’t red, purple or pink; I’ve got a yellow one. Okay it is not the prettiest flower in the garden but it is what I wanted. Hope it throws “pups” so I can have more flowers from it next spring.

After a very tiring Saturday I was prepared for a quiet Sunday with an afternoon snooze fitted in there somewhere. Wrong again. As I was half way through preparing a simple lunch I got a phone call, my sister and her husband were about twenty minutes away and could they come here? Okay, I put on a few more vegetables and hoped the meat would stretch to feed four. Not a lot you can do with visitors that come at short notice is there?

My sister is good company when she is in a good mood and fortunately Sunday was a good day. She talked for about three hours after lunch while Ray and her husband Tom nodded away in armchairs, lulled to sleep by their spouses’ voices. It was a happy visit.

I’ve finally given up trying to change people. It was taken me 60 years but then maybe I am a slow learner. If people tell me white is black I will concede it is gray in a certain light. This has partly come out of behavioural management training (don’t argue if you want peace) and partly out of a mellowing as I’ve aged. I don’t have to be right all the time, I can be happy in my own mind even while someone is telling me I am wrong.

It is a busy life from now on, with the parties, end-of-year happenings etc. That is okay, Ray seems relatively well and I am too so we should be able to manage. I have asked for help on a couple of the outings. Trev can’t take Ray to the church’s Men’s dinner so I will take him and my co-worker from Sunday school will keep an eye on him and bring him home for me. With another gathering I have asked if it can be at a friend’s house as I know she loves to do afternoon teas and will enjoy having the company. It is a win/win situation.

I did manage to go to Dementia support on Friday and was glad I did as the mentor there occasionally gives us an insight into behavioural issues that are useful elsewhere too. He was explaining separation anxiety and how it applies to putting someone into respite and full-time care. He explained that it is little doses of absence that help. We know that don’t we, with raising our kids? Out of the room, come back, out of the house, come back, out of town, and come back. The building of trust that says: “I’ll always come back, you know that.” Of course the way dementia works can sabotage that but it still applies to a certain extent.

When I explained that Ray is more and more silent now he just nodded. He knows I have handled most of what has come my way so far so he doesn’t need to pay an urgent home visit or call in a social worker to help me. Others there have more problems than I do so he will make appointments to see the people they care for and write an opinion that they can share with their doctor or other care workers.

I am thankful for what I have got. I look out on a nice neat lawn as my lawn mowing man came on Saturday afternoon just as I was finishing and really gave it a good mow. He should have been here Thursday but it rained that day. He is a cheerful person and always has a bit of a joke or a funny story. I am blessed by all who come into our home to help in any way. I enjoy the interaction they supply, particularly as Ray gets quieter.