A "Half-full" Week - despite parents' health problems

Since the beginning of the year we seem to have been in a loop of disruptions, and just when I thought things were settling down, after earlier-than-expected grandson, colds, my daughter's move, and then the snow, something else came along to throw everything pear-shaped. This time it was health problems for my parents. Something comparatively minor really - apart from the fact that if you're in your late 90s NOTHING is ever minor, so when a younger person would be nipping to see a GP, older folk end up in hospital, and when one goes in hospital, the other goes into respite care. So we've had a week or more spending all day out, dashing, or sitting stuck in traffic queues, between hospital and care home, getting home with barely enough time to walk the poor dog (who's definitely feeling neglected), grab a takeaway/frozen dinner, and collapse on the sofa, numbly watching old Star Trek Enterprise and Big Bang Theory, before falling asleep.
Nothing prepares you for having to turn into carer for your parents, and it's been a week that's left me physically and emotionally drained. Sadly, such weeks are bound to become more frequent.
It's too easy, though, to fall into the glass-half-empty mindset, so instead I've decided to list all the good things that also happened this week.


Firstly, a competition prize arrived. A Taste of Arran gift box won through CalMac ferries in the run up to Christmas. It's taken a while to arrive as e-mails got mixed up, but it's here! And filled with cheese, chutney, oatcakes, and (my Scottish favourites) haggis, and tablet (sort of like fudge but better).

Making time on Mother's Day to take Dylan the dog out for a special walk at Shipley Country Park, with new places for him to sniff, oh and daffodils and snowdrops for me to admire.

Later that day, tea with our eldest daughter to celebrate her first Mother's Day, and look, a wonderful 'first' for me too, a card from my baby grandson.




Retail therapy and discovering a fab new (to me) clothing brand, Lily and Me. FB has been showing me their adverts for a while, and this week I thought, Why not? Let's try them - and these first two tops are great.





Food - yes, we've eaten a LOT of frozen dinners and takeaways, but one day we treated ourselves to lunch at IKEA - hardly gourmet dining but it was different (Moroccan chicken), self-service so quickly picked up, and, most importantly, on the route from care home to hospital.


Our new armchair, on order for six or seven weeks, arrived.








More food! Lemon muffins from Morrisons. I don't often shop there but we were restocking my parents' food cupboards with cake, amongst other things, and I thought it best to test these myself.




The garden daffodils have survived the beating they took from the snow, and are now in flower.









And don't forget social media. I know lots of people knock it, but at times like these it reminds me that there IS more to life than sitting in traffic queues and hospital wards