Another Anniveresary

There is another anniversary this week, only this one isn't a wedding anniversary.  As of today, my mother has been at Atria for a whole year.   I told her that today and she looked kind of blank and asked where she had lived before Atria.  On the one hand that is sad, but on the other hand, since she has no memory of Terra Linda, it's a good thing that she is so content at Atria.

I brought the video of T-ball that Laurel made to show her.   It's about 10 minutes and I knew it was probably a bit long for her, but thought she would like to see the cute kids.  She seemed to like it, but asked me several times if that was "Tom's kid," if it was an all-girls team (Bri is the only girl), and when the kid who wears black horn-rimmed glasses came on (the cutest kid to photograph, I might add), she asked if Bri has to wear glasses all the time, or just when she plays ball.

Sigh.  But I think she enjoyed it, even if she didn't follow it at all and wasn't quite sure what she was watching.

And at the end, she asked me -- I kid you not -- if I thought she was going to live to hunnert.  At least she's consistent!

We went to lunch and sat with a woman who just moved in a few days ago.  She said she had met my mother the other night and knew her name.   To my surprise, she also knew where she had moved here from, so she must have hit my mother on a good memory day.

As she does whenever we have lunch, my mother scans the menu intently, then orders the same thing she orders every day (vegetable soup and fruit salad...and she never eats the copious vegetables, only the broth), then 2 minutes later she asked if we had ordered lunch and picked up the menu to try to remember what she ordered...and couldn't so she decided she'd just be surprised.

But as I said, she is content there and that's the main thing.  It's a good thing if you have no memory, because it's like Groundhog Day, one day is identical to the next.

We visited Tom and the girls the on Monday, and helped keep the girls occupied while Tom and Laurel were loading the car for their surprise trip to Disneyland (they didn't tell the girls where they were going until they were halfway there).

Bri had a toy makeup kit and the two girls were experimenting with how to put on makeup.  Boy, did they pick the wrong grandma for makeup tips! 

Here she is putting on some gross-smelling perfume, as I showed her how to do it...not realizing that it was really glitter.  Heck, I haven't worn makeup in about 30 years and they didn't have glitter in my make-up wearing days!

But she did get some lip gloss put on and I managed to help her put green eye shadow on her eyelids.

In the meantime, Lacie, who gets one jellybean when she pees in her little potty chair, toook matters into her own hands when it came to rewards.

As we left Santa Barbara, after our visits, State Street was ablaze with jacaranda trees, and I tried to enjoy them as much as I can, because the blossoms will be gone by the next time we are in town.

 
It really was a wonderful weekend, and I had a better time than I expected to.