February 13 – “Manners”

Well, it looks like there will be no help for the weary in our household.  The lack of an appropriate diagnosis on Mom makes her ineligible to get any significant immediate help.  Home health requires a specific illness or injury.  Hospice needs a “pending death” determination.  That leaves only one way to get the kind of help we need.  Pay out of pocket for it.  So what do we need?  Someone to help Chris give her baths.  Someone to come in and sit with her – help her to the bathroom, make sure she doesn’t fall, and see that she eats - for a few hours or even a weekend at a time so we can go to San Antonio and see Josh and family.  Of course it has to be someone Chris trusts as well, and that’s a pretty tall order right there. 

Speaking of Mom, Cailyn was very sweet toward her yesterday.  At lunch Mom got stuck in scraping the bowl mode.  That’s an unusual phenomenon that occurs quite often when she is eating.  Instead of putting food onto her spoon and into her mouth, she just scrapes the spoon around and around and around.  There are occasions when she will eat most of the food first before she goes to scraping, but yesterday I guess she thought she was finished already.  It’s like she hits a point of behavior and then forgets what is supposed to come next, so she keeps repeating and repeating like an old record with a scratch in it.  So this time she had a full bowl of food.  She had picked it up to better attend to her scraping, but the tilt was causing the food within to become precariously close to spilling into her lap.  Cailyn watched for a time until she couldn’t hold back any more.  Very patiently she reached over and gently pushed the bowl back to the table, quietly remarking, “There you go, MeeMaw.”  After several times I remarked, “Thank you, Cailyn, for being so kind to MeeMaw.”  She had an answer for me right away, “I’m working on my manners.”

Psalms 66:5 says, “Come and see what God has done, how awesome his works in man's behalf!”

Father, thank you for the awesome work you have done in my behalf on both ends of the spectrum.  Mom who is nearing the end of her life and Cailyn who is just beginning.  Both are amazing.  Amen.