One of my New Year's Resolutions is to blog more. Along with knitting more and weaving some again. All creative pursuits that have been lacking in my life.
My mother has been living with us for a couple of months. She'll be moving into assisted living in a few weeks, but keeping her house on the lake. We love having her here, we missed her terribly when she was so far away with my sister in New Mexico.
Our homeschooling life has adjusted with Mom here. We've had a notable reduction in the amount of time I can spend with the kids. We have been more relaxed with our schedules. I have missed more of our weekly activity group meetings than I am happy with. The kids who don't do well without a bit of direction and prodding have been playing many more wii games than reading, the one who is self directed has been doing just fine.
When I haven't been finding a community for my mother to move to, handling the lease agreements, the doctor's appointments, the shopping for things she'll need in her new place, I've been distracted by doing what is possible to keep her comfortable. She doesn't like to be left alone and needs help with many basic things. She doesn't want to be, and isn't, a burden, but she does distract me from things like reading to Small, helping Medium with a new project, or directing Large to put down the controller and read something.
On the other hand, the kids have learned larger life lessons by having her live with us. Small gets to entertain her nightly with monologues about various toys or star wars story lines while we get dinner on the table. Medium and Large have helped her in numerous, respectful ways and are seeing something of old age other than cartoon grannies with canaries. And we've all learned to slow down a bit. Our speech, the pace of our lives, our decision making. It's been a good thing.
My mother has been living with us for a couple of months. She'll be moving into assisted living in a few weeks, but keeping her house on the lake. We love having her here, we missed her terribly when she was so far away with my sister in New Mexico.
Our homeschooling life has adjusted with Mom here. We've had a notable reduction in the amount of time I can spend with the kids. We have been more relaxed with our schedules. I have missed more of our weekly activity group meetings than I am happy with. The kids who don't do well without a bit of direction and prodding have been playing many more wii games than reading, the one who is self directed has been doing just fine.
When I haven't been finding a community for my mother to move to, handling the lease agreements, the doctor's appointments, the shopping for things she'll need in her new place, I've been distracted by doing what is possible to keep her comfortable. She doesn't like to be left alone and needs help with many basic things. She doesn't want to be, and isn't, a burden, but she does distract me from things like reading to Small, helping Medium with a new project, or directing Large to put down the controller and read something.
On the other hand, the kids have learned larger life lessons by having her live with us. Small gets to entertain her nightly with monologues about various toys or star wars story lines while we get dinner on the table. Medium and Large have helped her in numerous, respectful ways and are seeing something of old age other than cartoon grannies with canaries. And we've all learned to slow down a bit. Our speech, the pace of our lives, our decision making. It's been a good thing.
