Busy Bees turned Snails

Last week my mom participated in her last speech therapy appointment. A bitter sweet moment. My mom is getting rather burnt out of all of this therapy day in and day out however I know that she still needs help in this area. Her self motivation at home to work on her homework or to work on things that could better her skills is lacking so it bothered me when she decided to be done. I told her so. She didn't like me for a while and I told her that I really didn't care at the moment. We got over it in about 10 minutes. Our family is good at voicing opinions and being openminded about them and then not letting them really affect us.

This Monday she completed her last occupational therapy appointment. I really love her therapist Mary that she goes to. She is incredibly knowledgable and is at the point in her career that she can work part time just to pass time. I love it because that tells me that she really loves what she is doing instead of doing it because she has to. Mary did have a great point when we visited for the last time with her. She mentioned how at any time my mom can come back for whatever length of time to freshen up her skills. She has a patient that has been doing that off and on for 5 years. She mentioned that burnout can easily happen and it is best to stop before it happens or gets really bad. After she said all of that, I didn't feel to overly frustrated about the speech thing, or all of it for that matter.

The challenge that my mom faces is that she really needs to involve herself in some hobbies that she enjoys to keep her self moving and actively thinking/doing. She needs to really self motivate and push herself to do things. She needs to get involved, do something. Others can only help her in these things so much. She needs to do it for herself and learn to adapt with what she has.

It will be quite interesting to see what happens when my dad comes home. He comes home in about 2 weeks and we are all so excited. She literally has nothing more than the gym 3 days per week and occassional doctors visits. I really wished that she continued on with her therapies for at least another month so that my dad could get a sense for our super busy days most times. He completely missed out. He missed the entire home routine from the beginning. He missed the therapies 2-3 times per week for 3 hours at a time until they slowly got shorter. He missed the times when we would quite often have therapies and then turn around and have a doctors appointment followed by the same thing the next day. Or a doctors appointment in the morning and another in the afternoon, sprinkled among my moms social schedule that was fun. Boy I do not miss those days at all but I wished my dad could experience it a little.

Now for the next two weeks, our days are filled with a totally different schedule. We have some shopping to do here and there and the gym but then...nothing. Okay not nothing but nothing scheduled. We have something to do and that is to get their house in absolute order before my dad comes home. We are working on getting things done, so that when he comes home it will all look great.

These next two weeks are going to come fast, that is for sure.