Finally...

It's been a long time since I had a minute or a stable Internet connection to write an update here: this afternoon I have both, so hopefully they'll hold up long enough for me to finish.  I already had one entry nearly done and lost it when I hit the 'home' button on my computer and accidentally went to iGoogle.  Note: be careful with elbows when writing on blogs.

It has been extremely busy around here.

That is a polite way of saying I have a lot of moments when I say, "Breathing?  What's that?  Oh yeah - it's that thing you do so you can get oxygen!"

Grandma has been home for almost 2 weeks now.  She's doing well, but it's taking a lot of adjustment on all our parts.  Ben and I are taking over from two shifts and a kitchen crew at assisted living; and Grandma is getting used to living at home again, which means you do things kind of a lot differently than at a home.  Instead of entertainment, we're running a household and doing more normal life things like folding laundry and preparing meals and hanging curtains (finally!!!  Hooray!!!).  The good part about this is Grandma has gotten a lot more motivated to walk because everyone around her us able to walk and do brisk, energetic, everyday things, whereas before she had a lot more people around her who were incapacitated.  It's funny how people don't tend to have a lot of ambition to do way more than what the norm is around them at the time.

Ben and I have been trying to establish a routine, but we still haven't been able to do a lot of our normal-living things yet.  Grocery shopping has been tricky to squeeze in, as has been even simple things like dinner with either of our families.  My dad said last week he thought we sounded like a couple with a new baby; but Grandma is not much like a newborn.  I understand handling new babies; but when you need to go somewhere and you have a baby, you plop them in the carseat and take them along.  Grandma can't do that.  She's also a grown adult woman and our grandmother, so she has definite likes and dislikes we have to work around whereas a baby does whatever the parents think best.

Ben is being a wonderful man, like usual.  I'm having a tough time sleeping right now - years of being the big sister have conditioned me to wake at every sound that seems a little out of place and Grandma is pretty vocal when she's sleeping - so this morning Ben got up with Grandma when I usually do and then brought me breakfast while I tried to unglue my eyelids.  He has also taken over Grandma's morning get-out-of-bed routine since he has to go to the office in the afternoon and that's when I'm on full duty; and he's the official physical therapist of the - and it isn't just the physical stuff, either.  He's been keeping me on track when I start to get scared or worried.  It's a lot to take on, getting married, moving, and learning to care for Grandma all at once.  I feel pretty foggy a lot and I'm hoping that gets better as everything settles in.

At the moment, I'm celebrating small triumphs like finally getting a garbage can for the kitchen.  Hey, when you're this busy, every little project you can finish is a Big Deal.  Oh.  Curtains for the living room.  We are officially no longer a complete fishbowl.  If we got the blinds on the doorwall, we would really be out of the fishbowl; but as I said...small triumphs.  One little thing at a time.

Speaking of which...time to swap laundry from the washing machine to the dryer.  No sense in adding Mount Washmore to the list of projects!