Category: Family

Some of you know that my mother has Alzheimer’s. It is amazing how many people are dealing with parents having Alzheimer’s. It’s no fun.

We moved my mom from her own apartment into an Alzheimer’s facility about six months ago. She clearly wasn’t safe living on her own, but it was hard to do. The place seemed good. It was in Appleton, Wisconsin, near where my brother lives.

But she remembered enough to know that she didn’t like it there. She just wanted to be on her own. So she started sneaking out. I have to hand it to her, she’s very resourceful. The doors have alarms so she would remove a screen window and slip out (first floor windows, but still).

This place ultimately told us that she had to be moved to a more secure facility. Luckily we were able to find a good one. Or so we thought. It was a bit nicer than the first place, more staff and they said they had experience with “wanderers”.

It turns out salesmen are salesmen, even in Alzheimer’s facilities. This was a serious case of overselling.

We visited her last weekend. She hadn’t seen Victoria yet and Danielle had been asking to see Nana. So we made the long trek to Appleton. My brother had told me that she was declining. It was very true. She knew who I was most of the time, but not all of the time. She seemed to know who Danielle was, but didn’t know her name. There was one point where she looked at my wife and had the following conversation:

“Hello, where are you from”

“New York”

“My, what a long trip. Are you here visiting someone?”

“Yes, you”

“Oh, I thought you looked familiar”

You have to laugh, otherwise you’d only cry.

But we would later find out that Mom was escaping from the new place as well. They just weren’t always telling us. She had started to get a bit manic depressive. She could be happy as a clam and then suicidal a minute later. One time she escaped and tried to go to a street and go into traffic, apparently trying to get hit. She wasn’t taking her medication, but the place didn’t tell us that.

So finally they recommended a short stay in a hospital that specializes in Alzheimer medications. They would observe her for 72 hours and try to get her on the right medication. But legally, we couldn’t just send her there. The Alzheimer place couldn’t just send her there. The only way for this to happen (short of getting her declared legally incompetent) was to let her escape again, call the police and have the police pick her up. The police could refer her to this hospital.

So that’s what happened. Her medication has been shifted to address her manic episodes. And she has been moved to a new, more truly secure place. We’ll see how she reacts to that.

But it was good to visit. Danielle got to see her Nana. Both my mom and my brother got to see Victoria for the first time (my brother will actually remember it). And Victoria is becoming a Packer fan…

We spent a long weekend in Newport, RI. This was Jazz Fest weekend, an annual event for us, but the first with Victoria.

We drove up on Thursday. It’s a bit of a long drive. You can do it in about 3 hours and 15 minutes with no traffic. But no traffic on I-95 means you are driving at 3 am.

Friday was supposed to be a rainy day, so we were planning to go to a nearby (sort of, about 45 minutes) aquarium. Plenty of indoor things to look at. And it rained hard. But not just rain, it was freezing. We get there and the minimal time you have to be outside was too much. Everyone was freezing. We get to one big indoor exhibit and I walk around with Danielle while my wife stays with Victoria.

This became a tricky day because Victoria had diarrhea and Danielle had attitude. Danielle is clearly going through an adjustment period. She loves her baby sister, but she’s acting out in different ways. On this day she was a handful.

But Saturday was another day. This was the day we went to Jazz Fest. And the weather completely turned around. We couldn’t have had a more beautiful day. It was about 75 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, a nice breeze coming off the water. The Newport Jazz Fest is in a beautiful spot on the water. The music wasn’t as great as last year, but everything else was. Good food, weather, stuff for Danielle to do. Just a perfect day. Tori was over her diarrhea and Danielle was over her attitude (well, mostly).

Our closing went off without a hitch. More than I can say for the rest of the process. For those that have followed this entire saga, it looks like our place is going to get certified as a three bedroom. This is amusing to me because we renegotiated the price (down obviously) when it appeared that it was a legal two bedroom. So now it looks like we got the price reduced and still got a legal three bedroom. Bonus.

The closing was a little less satisfying than normal since we don’t actually take possession for another week. It’s nice walking out with the keys.

On a related note, I was looking through some studies on stress (I have some self-interest here) and one of the high stress items was a “new mortgage over $100,000”. Either that statement is really old or whoever made the list doesn’t live in NY…

We’re closing on our new place tomorrow. So we had our walk-through yesterday. We showed up only to find an apartment completely furnished and lived in. So my first question was, “uh, when are you moving?”.

The response was, “the 24th”. Huh? They said, “didn’t your lawyer tell you?” Well, no. So there wasn’t really much point to doing a walk-through.

It turns out that their lawyer never told my lawyer. There was a contingency in the contract to give them an extra week if needed. They have to pay some fees to cover our expenses. It isn’t a big deal because we weren’t planning on moving until August anyway. But it would have been nice to know a while ago.

Buying a place is stressful enough…

The co-op board approved us and we will be closing on the 17th. We will be homeowners again. I’m definitely looking forward to it.

I was talking with someone in Amarillo today who was highly amused by this whole saga. He told me that in Amarillo you could buy a house and close in three weeks. Oh well, that’s life in the big city.

No adoption update thought…

Speaking of life in the big city, the swift-boating of presidential political candidates has begun. The international firefighters union has a web site called Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend. The firefighters have been upset with Giuliani for quite a while. They have three major gripes, two legit, one partially legit but very emotional.

1) The firefighters had defective radios and Giuliani knew this for years. The defective radios added to the deaths on 9/11 (firefighters didn’t get the evacuation call).

2) He picked 7 World Trade center as the command center when the World Trade center was an obvious terrorist target.

3) In November of 2001, Giuliani curtailed the search for bodies at ground zero. Conspiracy theorists (and this site) say that once they recovered the large amount of gold that was known to be buried at the site, other recovery efforts were stopped. This was a hugely emotional issue for the firefighters and was never forgotten.

Ah politics…

Since we are buying a place in a co-op, we have to get approved by the co-op board. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of a co-op, refer to an earlier blog. If the board doesn’t approve you, you’re out.

In some of the fancy shmancy Manhattan co-ops this may be a big deal, but in Brooklyn this is largely a formality. The broker selling the place knows the sort of people that will get approved by the board. For the most part they are looking for people who can pay the monthly maintenance fee on time, will be neat and not be loud.

We fit that definition pretty well. Maybe not the neat part, but we can keep our messes out of the halls.

So we met with the board last night. It was very casual and they were very nice. We’ll hear soon and then we can set a closing date.

On another subject, my wife’s friends surprised her with a baby shower. When you are adopting you don’t really expect a baby shower so that was a nice touch.

Lastly, I’ve recently added a Sonific Songspot to the blog. This is a site that allows you to link a song to your blog. I’ve been in a Latin jazz phase lately so I’ve been picking random Latin jazz songs from groups I’ve never heard of. I try to pick a new song for every post. This time I went with the blues. The hard part is that the song selections are pretty random. It’s no one you’ve ever heard of (well, you get what you pay for).

Do people like this? Is it annoying?

I hope all the fathers out there had good days on Sunday. Ours was simple but nice. We were at my wife’s sister’s place. They had a Father’s Day breakfast at their church and afterwards we went back to their place to play in the pool (it was hot), grill steaks and boil king crab legs. Yummy.

We’re waiting to hear when we go to Guatemala to pick up our baby. They need to get a new birth certificate issued in Guatemala City with the last name changed. That apparently takes about three weeks. Then we get the “pink slip” from the embassy telling us when we can come, and that’s usually about 2 weeks after the birth certificate. So hopefully mid/late July.

It looks like we are joining the ranks of homeowners again. After renting for a while, we found a place we like. It’s not our dream place. We always wanted the classic Brooklyn brownstone with the garden in the back. But the housing decline isn’t really happening here and those places are either out of our price range or require way too much work.

So we’re getting a nice apartment in a good co-op in our neighborhood. We’re moving really far. Amusingly, the building we are moving to is called the Ex-Lax building. Because it really used to be the Ex-Lax offices and factory. But it was converted to a co-op a while back and it has nice, big (by Brooklyn standards) loft like apartments.

Here are a few pictures (current owner’s furniture). It has big 13 foot ceilings which I love. Makes it seem very roomy.