And the snowy picture of the day is....
It's high time I posted the account of the Christmas period. Ho ho ho!
On Christmas Eve I was thinking what a miserable prospect Christmas with out Dad was. He was always the Christmassy one, the one who organised the tree and the dinner, the one I went to the footy with. I would have gladly not done Christmas this year, but as I missed Dad's last Christmas because he was on chemo and I had the 'flu, I couldn't miss what could be Mum's. I'm not really a Christmas fan anyway, Bah, Humbug, enforced festivities, yuk, etc, but really did wake up on Christmas Day with a sinking feeling.
We got to Mum's just after midday and I asked what there still was to do to for the dinner. My brother was not looking like he was going to participate any getting anything ready. Mum said she had put the chicken in earlier in the morning made a list of the timings of everything else. I was also wondering why there were two pans of boiling water on the hob, without anything in them. "They're for the veg!", Mum said, like I was an idiot who thought the kettle was for boiling the water to cook up some frozen veg, an idiot who didn't appreciate that the pans should be boiling for half an hour before the veg was ready to go in. Mum's list was very thorough and included all the different cooking times for the rest of the items, but with no indication of the actual time that it should all go on to be cooked. Dad used to be very good at this sort of thing, but being a technical man I suppose it was natural to construct the Christmas dinner into a project with precision timing. I had a quick work out that if the chicken went in the oven at 10.30, then everything had to go in, like, now, but then realised that the oven was on too low for the rest of the stuff, so just put everything in and hoped for the best. I had bought a pre-packed tub of mash when I did Mum's Christmas food shop and looking in the fridge it was nowhere to be found. That was because Mum had put it in the freezer for some reason and, naturally, you weren't supposed to cook it from frozen. So it goes on defrost in the microwave FOREVER...
Meanwhile everyone else is merrily unwrapping their presents. I got to see Mum unwrap only one of the presents I gave her. She seemed very jolly though. Merry Christmas!
Back to the microwave, which didn't appear to be doing it's defrosting job very well. Every time I stirred it up there were big lumps of frosty mash in the middle. As time was ticking on and everything else was nearly ready, I developed an internal dialogue about potatoes. "You can cook mash from frozen, right? Of course you can!". So mash is merrily cooked from frozen. No more lumps. And I made sure it was piping hot. Then a battle in the cupboards trying to find the serving dishes for the veg, the rewashing of the cutlery that wasn't so clean, the disintegration of the meat, the realisation that there were too many Yorkshire puddings. At least I pulled it together at short notice and got everything just about on time. No-one suffered the ill effects of poorly cooked mash, so I seem to have got away with it.
Mum offered to help with the pots, but I could see that everything needed a good clean in the kitchen really, so retreated to the sink with Barry Manilow on Radio 2. His version of River is surprisingly good. It took me nearly an hour to clear everything up, but from a standing start of trouble-shooting the Christmas dinner, I was surprised that all went well.
New Year was pretty rubbish, worse than Christmas for realising that Dad was gone really. I went to see Mum on New Year's Eve and rang her New Year's Day. She made a comment about it being very quiet and not having seen many people out and about. I casually asked if the carers had been and was told that she had cancelled them as she "wanted a rest". Here's me thinking that they were there help her to do just that! So, not only had she reduced the number of visits without me knowing, she was now cancelling visits altogether, even though no-one was planning to go round to see her. I was pretty annoyed and also worried that she'd actually got herself something to eat and drink, so we called round briefly in the evening to check she was ok.
I have concluded there is nothing I can do about Mum's views about the carers' visits. I spoke to her MacMillan Nurse last week and she was quite dismissive about my worries, probably because she won't be the one that's hot footing it over to Mum's house when she finds out she's not felt well enough to cook a meal after cancelling the carers. I am going to go with it for a while and see what happens. However, if the weather continues as it is, I won't be hot footing anywhere, cancelled carers or not. The snow is now definitely worse than when Dad was in hospital last February and very much colder. Of course brother managed to travel the 40 miles to Mum's house via public transport yesterday, with no problems. How some are blessed!
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