Yesterday morning, I realized that it was August 1st and the first day of camp. Woohoo!

Art by Mother

Three mornings per week, a van or car comes to our house and picks Mother up to take her to the Dunedin Day Center. They sing songs, read the paper, play Bingo (sometimes Mother brings me the packages of cookies she's won), and lots of other activities, including breakfast, lunch, and a mid-afternoon snack before she comes back home in the afternoon.


Sometimes she brings home artwork that she's done. Some projects are more impressive than others. Below is one of the first things she brought home and taped to the living room wall.

Soon after, this appeared below it.

Later, this painting appeared, and I was actually quite impressed.

Then came Christmas arts and crafts. (She won the candy jar by being the most accurate guesser of the number of candy canes it held.)

Several more paintings came home, and I was getting quite excited about Mother's previously hidden artistic talent until she told me that the canvases had pencil drawings they then painted.  Still, she seemed to have a good sense of color and blending, and I've purchased inexpensive frames to showcase the growing art collection. When they're all framed, I'll be able to replace the Easter basket she's taped up in the dining room.

Time Traveling Part 2: Sunflowers 2011

Last summer, I took some of the edgers that were stacked on the side of the house and blocked off a little garden area.  I decided to plant sunflowers. I started the seeds in little plastic pots on the lanai, alternately overwatering and ignoring them.  The survivors made it into the flower bed.

They grew pretty quickly, benefitting from the fact that Steve kept reminding me to water the tomato plants .

We got some nice blooms on them and even some bees visiting!

It soon became evident, however, that the extreme rockiness of the soil did not allow them to get a good root system going.  Even though Steve tried staking and tying them to help them stand upright, they never got strong enough stems to support or nourish themselves. Not one of the flower heads set seeds.

I did enjoy watching them grow, even if they didn't do as well as I had hoped.

This year, I've planted mint.

10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer (poster)

Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.

Time Traveling: Part 1 or Wow! I Just Found My Camera!

Late last summer (growing season in Florida begins in the fall), we made do-it-yourself earth boxes out of some surplus storage bins in order to grow tomatoes. It was quite exciting when our tomato plants grew taller that us! Bella, however, was not so easily impressed.

We stumbled out in the early mornings to make sure the water reservoirs stayed full, braving hungry mosquitoes and the chance that our neighbors would see us in various states of (un)dress. When the tomatoes started ripening, our excitement increased, and we eagerly awaited the first of our harvest.

We finally had a couple that were fully ripened (and not caterpillar abused), so we brought them in and gloried in their home-grown flavor.

When we realized that caterpillars were enjoying more of the ripening tomatoes than we were, we decided to head them off at the pass.  Fried green tomatoes!

Chef Steve carefully selected and sliced several tomatoes of goodly size, and with equal care prepared the cooking line for maximum efficiency.

Don't they look wonderful?  Chef Steve thinks so!

Bella remains unimpressed.

She just doesn't know what she missed!

Gradual Rewind

A few mornings ago, I walked into the kitchen for my second cup of coffee.  Mother was sitting on the couch in the living room, saw me walk in and hollered "peep-eye!"  Since then, she's said it a few more times as she's come around the corner to see me in the office, or when she's sitting in the living room or den and I walk into her view.  I mentioned it to Steve, and then had to explain to him that this is a southern or maybe just a family version of "peek-a-boo".

Mother has always had a great sense of playfulness and whimsy.  This new exclamation could stem from nothing more than thinking that it was a funny thing to say at the time, and continuing because our reactions are amusing.  Or it could be another indication of the Alzheimer's Rewind.

Steve asked me when she was last evaluated.  It's only been a few months.  I told him that unless she begins starting fires or wandering the neighborhood, we'd stay with the annual neuro work ups.

It's weird watching your mother grow younger as she grows older.

Stages of Alzheimers

The Alzheimers Association lists 7 stages of the disease.

Stage 1: No impairment
Stage 2: Very mild decline
Stage 3: Mild decline
Stage 4: Moderate decline
Stage 5: Moderately severe decline
Stage 6: Severe decline
Stage 7: Very severe decline

Mom seems to be mostly in Stage 4:

Stage 4:
Moderate cognitive decline
(Mild or early-stage Alzheimer's disease)
At this point, a careful medical interview should be able to detect clear-cut symptoms in several areas:

• Forgetfulness of recent events
• Impaired ability to perform challenging mental arithmetic — for example, counting backward from 100 by 7s
• Greater difficulty performing complex tasks, such as planning dinner for guests, paying bills or managing finances
• Forgetfulness about one's own personal history
• Becoming moody or withdrawn, especially in socially or mentally challenging situations 

but perhaps moving into the beginnings of Stage 5:


  Stage 5: Moderately severe cognitive decline
(Moderate or mid-stage Alzheimer's disease)
Gaps in memory and thinking are noticeable, and individuals begin to need help with day-to-day activities. At this stage, those with Alzheimer's may:

• Be unable to recall their own address or telephone number or the high school or college from which they graduated
• Become confused about where they are or what day it is
• Have trouble with less challenging mental arithmetic; such as counting backward from 40 by subtracting 4s or from 20 by 2s
• Need help choosing proper clothing for the season or the occasion
• Still remember significant details about themselves and their family
• Still require no assistance with eating or using the toilet 

Most of the time, it's not a big deal.  She goes to the Dunedin Day Center three times a week, which she just loves.  Edna, her home health aide, comes on Thursdays for her shower.  We go to Felix's Hair We Are every 6-7 weeks for our haircuts, grocery shopping every other week, to the drugstore monthly.  She's always cheerful and pleasant and easy-going.

But every once in awhile, something comes up that reinforces for me that even though the decline is very gradual, it is still there.

We went to a local restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner and had to park one small parking lot over  due to the crowd.  When we left, the walk from inside the restaurant, around the line of people still waiting outside, and maybe 40 yards on to our car had Mother so winded that she had to lean heavy on my arm the last few feet, and she huffed and wheezed half the way home.  It has nothing to do with her lung function, and everything to do with the fact that she not only watches TV every waking moment she's not at the senior center, but that she lies down on the couch to do it.  She is so very sedentary that any amount of walking seriously tires her.

After going out to dinner for her birthday, we stopped at the drugstore to pick up one of her medications that was waiting.  Since the pharmacy is in the rear of the store, she has to walk more than she would like and more than she is used to.  After picking up her meds and returning to the front of the store, we had to wait a moment for Steve to check out at the front register.  Since Mom was tired, she wanted to sit down, but there was no chair or bench.  So, she sat down on a stack of cases of plastic water bottles in a display at the front of the store, with no idea that this was not good plan or a safety issue.  I told her she couldn't sit there, and she couldn't understand why not, and I had to insist that she stand while she was insisting that she was tired and needed to sit.  And, since Mom is very hard of hearing, this conversation was carried out at a volume to allow everyone in the store to listen in.


When we got home, I talked to her about it again, and explained that the water bottles could have fallen, then she would have fallen, then they would have fallen on top of her, and she needed to agree that in the future she would only sit on things that were chairs or benches.  She agreed, but she seemed amused by it and I don't think she really understood my concern or why I was making such a big deal about it.