Caring for Papa...

After taking Claude to the airport on August 1st, I drove back to Papa's and picked him up for a drive in the country. This time I arranged with Andie to meet them at Cracker Barrel for lunch. Michael was going to meet us and have lunch with us. It was a very nice way to visit with the Marx family. 

Hayden has some warts growing on his thumb. He is having some treatments to freeze the warts and is seeing a doctor about them in a week. I smashed my thumb in my car door a couple of months ago. I have just been letting my thumb heal naturally. We compared thumbs and then took this picture of our poor old thumbs trying to heal. Goodness. 

The Mini's brought my birthday presents to our lunch. They had each carefully picked a gift for me. Hayden managed to find purple cereal! Is that cool or what? Bailey searched and found the right book for me to put my lists in. This clever book had pages with months and numbers at the bottom so you can circle what the date is you are needing things done by. She even wrote me a list on one of the pages. Love her little heart. Loved these gifts from our Mini's. 

After lunch I drove Papa on back roads to his home. He enjoyed the drive a lot.

Then there is the problem with his bathrooms. The toilets in both were leaking. The front bathroom had a cracked toilet and it was replaced and the floor was also had new tile put on it. Then they did the back bathroom floor and reset the toilet. It is nice to have these bathrooms fixed. I sat in Papa's apartment four out of 5 of days of one week so I could talk with the repair men as they came and went and keep everything straight for the first bathroom. The second bathroom was only two days. 

We are still up and down on the blood density. It is a strange thing that something could be so critical but you can't tell it without taking the little blood test. It doesn't show up on Papa or in his behavior, it just shows up on the test if it is too thick or too thin. Then they adjust the meds and we keep on trekking along. 

Papa's memory is horrid. He really melds things together in his memory. Then he ponders on something and comes up with a way that something would work and that is his reality. Doesn't matter if it is accurate or not, it is just his reality. That has given me a lot of pause. I have always felt that I would take these multitudinous pictures I take and my Blog and our travel scrapbooks and find joy and comfort in looking at them and remembering when I could do things and did go and see places and things. You know, have that joy in the journey again. Then I watch my Mother lose her memory with Alzheimer's. Now I watch Papa not remember so many things. I asked him if he remembered giving Mom Tyler roses on a whim when they lived in Shreveport. He has no memory of that at all. Yet she loved it and he loved doing it for her. Now, it is gone. Many, many things like that he has lost from his ability to remember. And, I pause and wonder what it will be like for me. Maybe I won't remember either. But maybe the pictures will help and the Blog will bring back memory. Or, maybe I'll just enjoy it as though it were all new to me. I'll just have to wait and see what my journey is at that point.