Friday, January 15, 2021

Friday, January 15, 2021

Tonight's picture was taken in December of 2006. Mattie was six year old and was posing in front of our Christmas tree. Each year that Mattie was alive, I featured a photo of him on the front of our family holiday cards. This was just one of the photos in a series I took that year. It wasn't the photo I selected for our card, but it is definitely one I love. It is hard to see, but our tree had many ornaments that Mattie handmade and I also had a holiday ornament for each family member who had died. 

Quote of the day: Today's coronavirus update from Johns Hopkins.

• Number of people diagnosed with the virus: 23,520,563
• Number of people who died from the virus: 391,922

It was my last day in Los Angeles. I feel like California gave me a gift today of an 80 degree day. It was absolutely beautiful out. Though I did not spend much time outside, every afternoon around 4 or 4:30pm, my mom and I go out for a walk while my dad is resting. Typically it gets cooler at this hour, but not tonight. It felt like spring. Absolutely glorious. 

It was a very FULL day. I did about three loads of linens as I disassembled the spare bed my mom uses. She stays in the guest room when I am here because my goal is for her not to worry about my dad, but to sleep and wake up on her own time schedule. I did cognitive and physical therapy exercises with my dad, completed all paperwork my mom gave me, printed out and attached the alarm company emergency number to every telephone in the house, cooked a full meal, cleaned and did more cleaning, vacuumed, walked four miles with my mom, packed, and the list goes on! 

Today's linner.... Broiled Italian sausages, corn on the cob, string beans, sautéed mushrooms and peppers. My dad likes variety and he doesn't like left overs, so it means cooking..... and cooking all the time!

Perhaps I am just tired, but right now my outlook on just about everything is NOT positive. 

After dinner, my dad found this math quiz in a magazine he was looking at. He was getting frustrated and gave it to me. He wasn't just unable to complete it, but he did not even understand the concept of lining up numbers and adding them by column. This was truly shocking to me because my dad had an advanced accounting background. He understood numbers and how they related to each other. Given his cognitive decline, even what was once intuitive to him is now gone.