The past two weeks have seen me prepping my family and my mom’s house for her homecoming. She has been in rehab for three weeks after spending a week and a half in the hospital recovering from knee surgery.

Never mind that she didn’t have bad knees – until she fell off a stepladder in her pantry and drove her femur into her tibia, dislocating her kneecap and splintering the crud out of her leg. Surely you think I’m horrible. I know she didn’t mean to do it…I do. Sometimes I wonder if she’ll ever listen to her doctors or any of her children, or if she’ll continue the rest of her life “knowing what’s best”.At what point is it okay for a child to “take charge”? There are no easy answers, I don’t think. I’m trying to put myself in her place, even when she frustrates the living crud out of me…because it has to be hard for her.

It must be difficult to give up control of your life – have your daughter, her husband and three kids move in to take care of you. There’s a loss of dignity in the realization that you just can’t take care of yourself BY yourself anymore. My heart breaks for her in that regard.

There is a teeny tiny part of me that wants to be angry with her. Angry for putting everyone else through what we must go through in order to take care of her. I’ve not been able to work one day this week – between home school, caring for her, and prepping for our home school co-op’s first actual day of classes (I’m the Life Skills teacher) – my days fly by with little accomplished on my ever- mounting list of to-do’s. I’m letting people down and I don’t like it. I feel like this is more than just a scheduling problem and it’s more than overwhelming at times.

But. God is still in control. He gave me a verse last week that has stuck with me, and keeps popping into my mind when things have seem particularly hard or unjust – Isaiah 40:31 “But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” I can’t explain what that verse has come to mean to me – I’ve heard it in church a hundred times, maybe more. But now I have understanding, because God is allowing me the opportunity to apply it to my life. I’m so thankful for that, even if I don’t always sound like it or show it.

So I’ve told you we have moved in with my mom for a few months, but I haven’t shown you where we are staying. Oh..and the reason we moved in with her is her house is about 5,000 sq ft, our is 1,350 – so hello. That should be fairly self-explanatory. 🙂 So here’s where the accident happened (the infamous pantry incident):

What is it about older people (my mom is 79) that they stockpile food like there’s no tomorrow? Tell me it’s not just my mom.

Here’s my room:

Don’t mind the clothes – I was still moving our stuff in. It’s all put away now. The only thing I can’t figure out is what the heck to do with all those pillows on the bed when we’re sleeping on it. Seems wrong to throw them on the floor….but there’s no where else to put them!

The girls have a nice little room. Abby has already put her stuffed animals all over the bed, thus “marking” her territory:

I would show you where the boy is sleeping, but he doesn’t have a place. He’s on the couch. Poor kid. We didn’t want to put him upstairs by himself and we needed to be on the first floor in case my mom needed me.

My absolute favorite thing about my mom’s house is where we’ll be doing our school. It’s in her sunroom and I el oh vee ee love it. I’m a sucker for light – and this room is perfect to me. We’ll get lots done in here:

And I’ve set up my temporary workstation in the corner of the room – until today, it looked like this:

Now it looks worse. Bwuahahaha. Okay, not really…but I didn’t take an “after” photo. I miss my desktop -I’m used to working with both a laptop and a desktop and this will definitely be an adjustment for me. See the little electronic gizzywidget in the bottom right hand corner? That’s what a Life Alert station looks like. It saved my mom’s life June 25th, 2010.

So that’s pretty much it, unless you count this huge mailbox I found while cruising one of the older neighborhoods in town a few weeks ago. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with ANYTHING, but I wanted to show SOMEONE. So pretend it’s relevant. Thanks.

Why on earth would someone need a mailbox that big? I’m just sayin’…