So let’s start with my mum. I haven’t written an update on her for a while.

She’s still in the hospital, even though her pneumonia is cleared up. For a while there she was so lethargic and unwilling to move that the doctor told me it was likely her dementia’s progression, and that she’d never get better. So last week, on her 89th birthday in fact, we had a meeting with the hospital’s discharge planner, the head nurse from her retirement home, and myself. My mother refused to get up and walk, so it was decided that I needed to start looking for nursing homes. She wouldn’t even lift her hand to feed herself.

I explained it all to her when the meeting was over, and it was as though a switch flipped. The next day she was up walking.

It took a few days, but I convinced them to go back and reassess. Yay! I thought. She’d be able to go back and live somewhat independently! But no, now her ankle is swollen and she can’t put any weight on it. The x-ray turned up nothing, so gout, maybe? The good news is she’s more alert and less confused than I’ve seen her in a long time, probably due to not smoking for a month.

And even better, she seems to have forgotten that cigarettes exist. She hasn’t asked for one in three weeks.

Fast forward to yesterday morning, I was sitting in the living room with Alex (who was supposed to go to his dad’s this weekend but didn’t–it’ll be at least 2 months again before I have a break), when my eldest son came upstairs and said he thought a pipe had burst. There was water under his desk in his room.

When I got down there, half the basement was flooded. All the cardboard boxes on the floor and everything in them, I figured, was ruined. Turned out it wasn’t the whole basement once we got stuff moved, but the leak had been ongoing for some time. The stuff that was ruined was really bad. The good news is I think we’ve managed to plug up the hole, which is half-way down the wall in the concrete behind an electrical outlet. The bad news is mold.

Fast forward again to this morning. The windy weather made Alex decide he wouldn’t get dressed to go to school. So we did our usual dance when he’s misbehaving, him screaming at me and punching me and me ignoring him the best I can until he complies. Which he always does, eventually, and usually with minimal damage until this morning when he decided to hit me in the side of the head with his sock. It wouldn’t have hurt except he got me in the eye. My only good eye. The other one is legally blind.

So I’m off to the eye doctor today, just to make sure there’s no serious injury. The sock in question was one he’d worn before, and I think he had it on downstairs yesterday. Nothing like an infection to ruin your entire life …

Happy, happy, joy, joy.

The bright side? Alex actually went to school today on the bus, even though there’s snow. Keeping my fingers crossed we’ll finally have a full week of school, the first one this year.