Caring For Grandma and Making It Work

Although we had to care for his grandmother who lived about an hour away, together we managed to do it. Our love, patience and endurance helped. Every other weekend, I would pack up our girls, his clothes and mine & as a family we would take the drive down to the city. We would stay with her and  clean, fill her medicine container for the week, grocery shop and cook meals for her preparing them in storage containers to be held in the freezer for the week so that she could conveniently take a container and place it in the microwave oven if she was hungry. This would last about two years and we were consistent. At  times, a family friend would step in for us and pick her up for dinner  which was a nice change in pace for her.
In 2003 as time passed and her health began to fail, she decided to sell her home in the city and buy a smaller home closer to us. It was a blessing. We no longer had to make the trip down to the city packing up the girls, their toys and our things for the weekend. Still a job that had to be completed, but now I had to make an adjustment including her into our everyday life. For a young woman just starting her family and looking forward to only caring for her immediate family, this was no easy task but manageable.
My daily routine for years would consist of caring for two homes and five people. Wake up, get my children ready for the day, make them breakfast, drop my oldest off at school, drive to grandma's home, wake her up, lay out her clothes, make her breakfast, sit her medicine and breakfast on her table and head back to my house to prepare dinner and get it out of the way early. Next was teaching my youngest daughter her beginning education basics. When she went down for her nap, then it was time for laundry, sweeping, dusting, feeding the dog etc. until it was time to get our oldest from school. I'd pick her up, swing by and pick up grandma (so that she could spend time with us and we could have dinner together), sit down and help our oldest with her homework and daily reading, greet my husband, serve dinner everyday about five o'clock, bring grandma home and help her change for bed, give her the night medication, come home bathe our girls, take a shower, make love to my husband, fall asleep, wake up and prepare to do it all over again....