In-to-lunch. :-)

THERE we are. Great scene welcomed me back into the kitchen tonight.
A nice empty lunch delivery box. Food consumed and box nicely washed.
Not a burned pan in sight.


I could come in at 6.30 pm and start making the miso soup, the pork and veggies Chinese fry thing in a packet sauce, the rice, pickles and left over tofu/spinach something.
Okaasan got back in at 6.45 pm and she and I sat and chatted about how much money Japanese star pitcher Yu Darvish will get to play in the US and how much his ex-wife will get etc etc
And my tale about 3 students cancelling classes this week as influenza strikes led Okaasan into a new - a NEW! - story about how she kept her little boys at home and healthy for the first 3 years of their life and how 1-year old Yujiro went off walking on his own....told me THAT story about 10 times...obviously she loved telling it and giggling at exactly the same place on each telling.


I had a little tremor of fear when I mentioned the lunch delivery etc and Okaasan said: "There's no need to go to the trouble of ordering me lunch like this..."


I thought she was about to say: "I'll cook my own lunch and burn the house down for you!", but she seemed to be saying that she could go OUT to lunch etc.


I quickly stamped on that idea and talked about the weather and the icy roads etc etc....better to stay in at lunchtime and how this delivery system was SO convenient.....PLEEEESE just enjoy it...and let me get on with my working life. Well, I didn't say the last part.
I mentioned that when Yujiro is away it is hard for me to cook lunch and dinner every day etc....so "just while Yujiro is working away a lot let's use this service shall we?"...and Okaasan seemed to accept that idea...I think. Hope.


Oh God I hope.


So. Friday night. And look what I got!!! Two students gave me presents this week: homemade plum wine and strawberries and cream.......so that's what I am into tonight.....

**** Bit puzzled about this....my blog counter thingy on the side here says there have been OVER 200 blog visits today. I don't know why. Haven't been that many since we had our domestic violence interlude 2 years ago or when my Dad and step-mum died....or the recent F&%$#}{|! Sale story....why? Are old lady lunch boxes so interesting? I can't think that my topic labels of "dementia" "cooking" and "day care avoidance" or whatever could attract so many views.
Very odd.
Facebook is somehow now connecting Network Blogs...maybe it's that.....I'm not so sure everyone I know on Facebook really wants to/needs to read these domestic ramblings.
Very odd.

Getting in some help.

Gonna have a lunch box delivery service next week, and maybe beyond, to give me a  chance to breath.


So happy about that. A big part of my brain is jumping up and down making whooping sounds. ;-))


We did it before - 2 years ago? - and now we decided to bring it in again.


He came home last night with his ski teaching schedule into February ....day after day after day of being away basically. A night or two passing through home. But basically away till February 4.


I said I couldn't. Needed help.
No big drama. I just suggested the hot lunch delivery service and he agreed.


Making lunch for Okaasan ISN'T hard. It's troublesome, and in a busy working week it is One More Thing To Do. The past week we haven't had heavy snowfall, if we do, then clearing snow outside the front door will ALSO have to be factored into the morning duties.


Usually, sometime between a shower/getting dressed/packing my work bag/settling the cats/finding my house keys....somewhere in there I am usually in the kitchen heating up something/quickly cooking something to put in Okaasan's lunch flask, heating up the rice, cutting up some pickles, putting some kind of vegetable out, putting the instant soup packs in a bowl etc


Then, when I come home, I usually wash all the dirty plates because she doesn't. She thinks she will "after a bit of TV and a sit", but she doesn't.
And in between work I am thinking about the shopping for this: what kind of sloppy food I can make to put in the flasks.
The other day I risked giving her a half cooked flat fish, showed her the fish and explained she just had to heat it. Left her to it. Came home 6 hours later wondering if I'd find a burned pan...or worse. But she HAD managed to do it with minimal burn.


Okaasaan really can't cook. Just about heat something up. Put an egg in a pan of soup. Can't really use the microwave. She wouldn't starve. But she wouldn't eat well, and the kitchen would look like chimpanzee cooking day at the zoo....because she doesn't wash or put away stuff. And last summer we were getting to the 3 burned pans a week stage...which added a whole other task into the late afternoon...scrubbing the pans usable again.


So. Hot lunch delivery service commeth. Okaasan had it before and it was ok. But after a while she said she got bored with the food and wanted to go out for lunch. Was that winter? I don't remember.


So happy about this. 
Yes, I CAN do it. But day after day on my own - not to mention the whole dinner duties too and what-to-talk-about - it is just grim. When he is here we take turns with it all, and it doesn't seem so bad. If he is away for a week and more - I think I might go pop.
Of course I could make more time in my morning - get up earlier, stop wasting away time playing Wordscraper games on Facebook etc...stop going to the gym in the late afternoon and shop and go home and pre-cook stuff.


But why should I?


I have a life. This isn't my mother. This family isn't poor. Paying for a hot lunch to be delivered to this old lady would be a BIG help.


I'll take it.


One of my students was so excited to hear about this today, she said it could be a first step in Yujiro accepting that we need outside help etc - and once again I got the Day Care Centers Are So Wonderful speech from a concerned, kind person.
I don't think this is going to lead direct to day care. Yujiro doesn't want to face THAT hurdle yet. Doesn't want to initiate the inevitable fight with Okaasan on that topic. Doesn't want to admit to himself maybe that we can't do it all.....
He is happy to let it all drift along - with he and I taking turns to make it all go smoothly. And generally it does.


But when he is away for more than a few days the balancing act becomes a lot harder and I'm reaching out for the support now.


Still have to do dinners though :-(

Option C?

Nope.
Didn't work.
Well, half worked, I guess.


Lunchtime stuff: she didn't eat at all. May have been because she'd just come home from the dentist and didn't feel like it.


Dinnertime she ate the raw fish, ate the salad, didn't eat the potato salad because it was too hard....and couldn't WAIT until 7 pm when the rice cooker was ready....so she went OUT for more food.


;-(


That wasn't the idea at all.
Why couldn't she wait? Or why was she trying to eat dinner before 7 pm? It's always been the time we do dinner. I found the shopping receipt that shows she was in the local supermarket at 6.47 pm....if she'd waited 30 mins there would have been freshly cooked, steaming rice in the rice cooker.


Ho hum.


Option C, which we've just come up with is : to use hot flasks and food containers. Cook up lunch in the morning before we go to work and leave it for her on the kitchen table.
All she'd have to do is open up the flasks and the hot food, rice and soup will be inside. Like food delivery service, but delivered by US to the table at 9 am when we head out to work. We used a lunch delivery service 2 years ago in winter. It was fine, but in the end Okaasan got a little bored with the food and asked us to cancel it.


This weekend we'll go and look at flasks etc and see if Option C is workable. Can't do any more burned pans.
I know this all seems like mountains-out-of-molehills - but that's the daily life stuff that occupies our minds with Okaasan. How to make things easy for a lady who has failing abilities, while maintaining the cheerful facade that "nothing is wrong"....
SHE thinks she can heat up stuff in pans and feed herself. 
We know that left to herself in the kitchen she burns the pans and leaves uneaten or half-eaten food out on the counter or table.
She'll never go hungry because she can find the food on the table or fridge and help herself, and she can go shopping and buy pre-cooked or cold food.
But the rice/egg/soup cooking in the pans isn't so successful anymore and as winter arrives she won't be able to get out and shop.
We have to find a way of giving her hot food at lunchtime, without her using pans and the cooker.




On a different topic: Okaasan and her memo making.
She is always doing this. Sitting in front of the TV making memos about recipes and TV shopping telephone numbers etc etc. When she isn't writing memos on scraps of paper she is picking them up from the table and carpet around her and looking at them thoughtfully, setting them to one side....and then minutes later picking up the same memo.
It's obviously a self-preservation method against the deep-down knowledge that she IS forgetting important stuff.


The other day one of the memos ended up mixed in with our post. Maybe she'd left it on the kitchen table and it got scooped up with letters.
Anyway: it's for a recipe for noodles and sesame sauce, other random bits of writing...and this:


"To prevent the onset of dementia it is important to focus on yourself and give up trying to be a good wife and mother". (this was in Japanese of course).


How true! Yes, absolutely.


It comes back to what I reckon is my biggest question about dementia - how far Okaasan understand her own condition - truely, deeply inside herself.
I think she must know, must worry about it and hopefully accept that we will help out when things get a bit mixed up.
When she sees programs on TV about dementia does she think - "oh, I should watch this, it may help me"...or is it more "one day I may be like this, how sad for these people".??


When she is asking me about which trash goes in which box, or what day of the week it is, or what she ate for lunch - all of those kind of questions about things she would usually know, but now isn't sure about - is she acknowledging that things are falling away bit by bit?


Anyway. Interesting to find Okaasan making memos about dementia!

Lunch...very Japan-esy (J)

I just made okaasan's breakfast.
..lunch....brunch. Should have some kind
of fish in it really. Some pickles maybe.

But not bad. For a gaijin.

２００８年１２月９日（火）

お昼ごはん・・・とっても日本的

（写真説明）

ワタシ、お義母さんの朝ごはんを作ったのよ。

・・・ランチ・・・ブランチ　　本当はお魚かなんかをつけなきゃね。たぶん、漬物も。

でも、悪くないわ。ガイジンにしてはね。