Getting stuff done

One extra hour

One extra hour

Imagine how great it would be to have just one extra hour in the day to get done exactly what you wanted to complete.  Now, let’s take a look at how much time you spend in a day worrying about the things you’re not getting done. How much time do you spend convincing yourself that this is OK? Or what about the energy you expand on being frustrated and angry that you’re not even close to getting the things done you used to.

 

For me, I would start out gung-ho with a plan and an agenda of how I was going to get everything I needed to do done. Then usually a “crisis” would come up which needed my attention more than my schedule did. Now the crisis didn’t have to be very big like a cracked tooth or a school invent, but usually it’s something that just needs all my attention. Slowly but surely the things that I had put on my schedule were being left undone. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy doing some of the things that interrupted my day, but I didn’t love all of them. What would happen is that I would start worrying late into the night and wondering whether or not anything was ever going to get finished.

 

Planning ahead of time

Planning ahead of time

Planning ahead of time

How often do you hear stories about parents failing health causing falls or worse?

rushes to hospital emergency. The levels of stress and emotional upset these

events create are intense. There is a drop everything call-to-arms and we all rally

around to wait and see what happens next.

Does this sound familiar? Are you having these events happen with alarming frequency? How can you stop the knee jerk reaction when it is so instinctive.

Getting stuff done

Getting stuff done

Do you ever feel like no matter what you start, how excited you were when you started, nothing ever seems to get finished? There's always some interruption, there's always something more important that needs to be done, there's always someone who needs your time and more than you do.  Is it just impossible to find the time to get tasks completed that you started no matter how exciting they are if they're not important to the collective that you belong to?

The Turning Point. Part 5

The Turning Point. Part 5

In life, things keep going along in a straight line and nothing really changes much until there is an interruption, so it was in our story. The progressing mental decline of my MIL and her advanced age of 94 along with the inherent loss of visual acuity, strength, and balance all converged in one mighty crash. On a chilly Friday afternoon just before dinner, while we were relaxing and getting ready for a weekend, there came a huge bang from above. My daughter and I heard it, without thinking, we raced upstairs. We found my MIL where she had fallen getting up from her easy chair. She was aware and in considerable pain.
Thank goodness that in that moment everyone was home, we called 911 and the paramedics came in about five minutes. Hauling her tiny broken body down three flights of stairs was another matter entirely, it was done on an old-fashioned cloth and pole stretcher.
The surgery was thankfully scheduled for Saturday, it could be performed without general anesthesia to which she reacted badly. The family rallied and sat with her around the clock. For a month we watched her recover physically and battled the administration to find her an appropriate placement in a memory care facility.