I sometimes wonder why I called my blog what I did! For the last year life has been anything but quiet!
Dear readers, believe it or not but it is over a year since my PE . . . August 13, 2015. Since then there have been a few other major family events. I'm going to mention them briefly and leave it at that.
- Chuckles and Braveheart have separated.
- Jamila and Levi have separated
- Jester and Frosty are in the middle of separating/trying to sort things out
The other major thing that happened is that my lovely Mum passed away after 6 1/2 years living in a rest home. Throughout this whole time Mum hardly ever complained, suffered with dignity, keeping her sense of humour as long as she could. The main reason Mum had to go into care was Parkinson's which meant that as her health and mobility deteriorated Dad was unable to continue caring for her at home. A fractured hip and a couple of strokes didn't help either! Dad visited Mum faithfully nearly every day of those long six and a half years. I rarely saw Mum upset. Only once did I see her really upset and this was after Dad had his 2nd stroke. I'd asked Sheri to let Mum know Dad was in hospital after the stroke. Later in the day I visited Mum and she was sitting in a chair looking so sad. I asked her what was wrong and she couldn't answer, but a tear rolled down her cheek. I took a guess, not hard, and asked her if it was Dad. She nodded yes. "He's ok, Mum, he's ok. He had another stroke but he's ok. They need to do an operation . . . but he's doing ok."
"I thought he'd died and no-one had told me," she said quietly, a few more tears rolling down her cheeks. That is love, strong love, pure and simple, though they never said much about their feelings for each other.
I stayed with her a while till she was happier and before I left I had a word with the staff. They said in the morning when Mum had woken up she had said the same, and they had assured her it wasn't so, as I'd thought, but since Mum's memory was no longer great she hadn't been able to hold on to the information.
By the end Mum wasn't able to talk much even. It was hard to know if she still recognised most of us, but I'm sure she still knew who Dad was till the end.
Since Mum had been so unwell for so long, slowly deteriorating, it was for her a blessed relief to finally pass away. She had never wanted to be "a vegetable" as she termed it, however all her cares needed to be done for her for a long time. For us . . .it was sad, but for me personally it was a relief that she was no longer suffering.
The tough part was that Mum passed away on Locket's 16th birthday :( but Locket was very unselfish about the whole thing. Sad that her Nan had passed away, not that it was on her birthday. We did our best to have a wee time of focusing on her at dinner time but it was unfortunately overshadowed a bit by Mum's passing.
We had a lovely funeral service with lots of family and friends attending. Rest in Peace, Mum, gone to be with your Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Since then there have been a few ups and downs, a lot of things to help sort out such as probate. This has needed trips to the lawyer, banks and paperwork to be done.
It is mostly sorted now. Pa has been doing ok, sad understandably as Ma's passing has left a huge hole in his life.
I think I'll leave it there for now.
Wednesday 28 December
Well . . . that was written some months ago! And that is the kind of year it has been. One thing after another, the days just fly by and there seems to be hardly any time for anything. Not enough time for blogging anyway!
So now Christmas has been once again. We had a lovely day, first time in quite a few years that all six of our blessings were all there on Christmas Day. There were fifteen of us altogether, with the five grandblesssings there. We managed to get some long overdue family photos 😀
The last few days I've just been relaxing. Christmas Day is always busy, a meal here for all of us, then for me a trip over the hill to Featherston to take Braveheart, Halfpint and Battler home along with Peppa, the dog. Peppa came over with Braveheart as she cut her paw on something just a few days before Christmas and needed stitches. She is a lovely dog although by the end of the day I think she was glad to get back to her own place with less people!
Locket came for the ride with me and once we had done the drop off to Featherston we headed back to Wellington and over to Miramar to Charles and Lynne's home for the usual Xmas day get together there. We got there about 7:30pm and had a good time catching up with those who were there. By 9:30pm I was beginning to blink and yawn, tiredness catching up with me after a 5:45am start to the day. I got up when I woke up as then I got a wee bit of P&Q before the busyness of the day 😉
At the moment I'm using Brains' tablet as my laptop had to go for a visit to a friend. It couldn't
O.K. it is more than time I posted this. There aren't many days left of 2016! Three to be exact. I will try to post again before then. No promises though!
