Day 2 - Solo dining and a letter.

Tried, and failed to be a good Oyomesan...but not my fault.

Okaasan has eaten alone for two days, since we were out Wednesday night and I was working Thursday night.
That means she hasn't had a conversation longer than a few words with anyone for 2 days either.

Okaasan's lunch things waiting for me at 5 pm.....

So, last night I was home and cooking. Made a delicious pork/potato/miso soup, and equally delicious rice with little scallops in it, plus saute mushrooms. All great.
Okaasan came home about 6.20 pm and sat watching Tv surrounded by magazines, newspapers and convenience store and bread shop plastic bags...

At 7 pm I called her in for dinner. But she looked uninterested.
"I've only just come back and sat down, I'm not ready for dinner yet. What time is it? What time is dinner? I've just come back..I'll wait and have dinner when Yujiro is home...he's in Tokyo???!!! Why...for job training....????...."

Sigh. But. Yippee. I can have dinner alone.
So I sat at the kitchen table and read the newspaper and ate the delicious dinner.
Two meters away Okaasan sat in her room watching TV. I hoped she might hear the sounds of chopsticks on bowls and come and join me...but no.
Ironically - in the paper I read a really interesting story about a documentary called "Everyday is Alzheimer's" (Mainichi ga Alzheimer), it was made by a Japanese woman who came back from living in Australia to care for her mother. You can find bits of the movie on YouTube and I think there have been some public showings too - looks interesting.

After eating I washed up the cooking stuff and my plates and put hot food for Okaasan into the lunchtime flasks, she was still watching TV. I told her that dinner was on the table anytime she wanted...and left her to it.

:-( A pity really. I hoped to give her some mental stimulation over dinner. But I think she'd eaten something out, or brought home bread and snacks - so of course...not hungry.
If I was a really good Oyomesan I would have gone into Okaasan's room and tried to get her chatting about something to FORCE the mental stimulation on her, but it was already 7.45 pm on Friday night and I was ready to relax. So, I left her blobbed in front of the TV.
Later in the evening I noticed she had eaten what I'd left out for her. She will never, ever starve :-)

This weekend winter arrives in Sapporo and I doubt she will go out, maybe I should take her out for lunch or dinner? I should make sure she actually has conversation anyway.

AND!!!!!!
The letter from the city office about day service has ARRIVED!!!!!!!
I've opened it. No excuses, just nosy...and desperate.

I think it says that she qualifies for Level 1 - which is the lowest level of service...and there are lists of day centers and forms to be filled in etc etc
Exciting!!
Dear Son is away till next Wednesday, so nothing can happen.
But the Next Stage of Getting Public Help is HERE in the house. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes!!!

Lunches.

There's a Peanuts cartoon strip of Snoopy moving the clock forward so he can get Charlie Brown to feed him earlier and earlier....


I get that feeling with Okaasan sometimes.


Eating times...such a fluid subject.


I fed her lunch yesterday about 11.30/11.45 am (that's actually how we refer to this task - either "feeding Okaasan" or "doing Okaasan") and chatted a bit in the kitchen with her as she ate rice, simmered fish paste and vegetables, salad, pickles, soup etc - explained that I was going out shopping with a friend and would eat later.
After serving Okaasan with her rice I put the rest of the cooked rice in freezer boxes, and left them one one side to cool down.


Then I left home and spent 4 wonderful hours with my recently arrived friend and her baby in a shopping mall and big recycle shop. Just wandering and shopping, chatting and stuff. She needed non-slip shoes and was thinking about an automatic baby rocker...I was ambling happily.
We were once room mates long ago, then friends through email and phone calls for years, with once a year meet-ups for lunches or overnight stays.
Now we are able to amble together on a Saturday afternoon. Still can't get over this really.:-)


I got home about 5 pm to think about dinner.
Lunch stuff was all eaten and the plates as usual were sitting around with bits of water in them on the draining board...ready for Okaasan to wash in that never-coming-"Later".


And one freezer box of cooked rice was missing. And the eggs were on the table.


Okaasan had helped herself to yet ANOTHER box/bowl of rice mid-afternoon. I guess she'd wandered out into the kitchen sometime between 1 and 5...seen the rice box and ....


In her room on the carpet I could see the empty rice bowl, with egg shells in it (Japanese people consider rice and raw egg and edible mixture) - I popped my head into her room to see if this all meant she didn't want dinner...


"Dinner? Oh yes, I want dinner! That rice and egg? Oh that was lunchtime...."


And so it was in her mind. Maybe after the first lunch she'd slept until about 2 pm....woke up and felt a bit peckish...wandered into the kitchen and found the rice boxes....the first lunch and chatting with me in the kitchen was gone from her memory (even though the dishes were still there where she'd put them) and this lady who swears by the mantra "Thou Shalt Not Overeat" had tucked into yet more food.


And then: at 7 pm we sat down (some ski teacher popped in for dinner and bed, don't know who he was...)....and Okaasan ate a large bowl of spaghetti, salad and soup.


I MUST make sure there are snack-type foods for her in the kitchen. It doesn't matter if she eats  rice multiple times a day of course, but her increasing weight isn't going to help mobility etc...it would be better to get her snacking on a piece of fruit or a yogurt.


Okaasan sleeps a lot in her room. She wakes up and has no sense of what time it is. Yes, I know there's a clock in her room...but...


And today? Learned that lesson. I laid out lunch for her about an hour ago - I'm upstairs here hiding cos I can't be bothered to have lunch with her - and I've put some long stewing raddish and tofu potdish up out of sight on the microwave...so she can't: a) attempt to join in the cooking of it and b) eat it.


From tomorrow: the LOOOOOOOOOONG haul of solo-Oyomesannning. He is goes off tomorrow for 14 days...yes FOURTEEN days...of ski work out in resorts in the center of Hokkaido. He won't be back till Feb. 5th.


I've got lunch deliveries.
I haven't got the car.
I've got another bottle of homemade plumwine.
I've got my friend and her baby.
I've got this blog :-) and all you nice people!!!!


I'm buckling up for the ride.....14 days.......

Evening walking..

Okaasan did it to Yujiro last night again.
Dinner was almost ready (albeit a tad earlier than usual because we were both home by 5 pm).
Anyway, we were both in the kitchen putting it all together. The salad was on the table, the chopsticks and Yujiro was heating the tofu thing, the rice, the soup.....
And Okaasan opened the door from her room to the kitchen and announced she was going for a walk. The door actually has big glass panels in it so she can see what is happening in the kitchen easily.
But didn't make any difference.

Off she set:"just going to the station and back."
BUT! This time Yujiro just went ahead and served dinner for the two of us. No: "Let's wait for her etc". I was a bit surprised, but of course ok with that. I haven't actually been home to have dinner with Okaasan for 5 nights in a row and one more night escaping that chorse is fine by me!
We ate our dinner. Washed up. Okaasan came home around 7 pm (with another small supermarket box to add to her room collection) and Yujiro served her food and we left her to eat alone.

*  Supermarket boxes. This started a few weeks ago. Okaasan got one and then another box from the supermarket and has them on the carpet in her room. Now there are three! I think this was spurred by an idea about collecting up newspapers for recycling. I went to her room to try and prise some newspapers away from her - and I had some newspapers in a box. I think she has remembered THAT and then brought the boxes into her room to do it herself.
But actually she has forgotten WHY she brought the boxes in. I tried to gently suggest taking them into the hall cupboard a few weeks back but Okaasan stopped me: "No! I brought them here specially, I'm going to use them for something. What was I going to use them for?".......