Laughter in the house!

"When is Ted coming?"

"Is Ted here?"

"Have you heard from Ted?"

Those questions have been constant for almost a week. So finally last night I said, "What's this obsession with Ted? He's not here. He's not coming. He's at work. I don't know when he's coming. Don't ask me about him anymore."

I said it in a nice way; she chuckled and said she would try to stop asking.

An hour later she says, "Is Adam downstairs by himself?" "Yeah," I say, thinking, if we're upstairs, of course he's downstairs by himself. Who would be with him? "Oh, I get it," I say. "You can't ask if Ted's here, so you'll just ask if Adam's by himself. Like, who else could possibly be with him?" She thinks that's funny, so I decide to play it for all it's worth.

"You sly fox," I tease. "Who could be downstairs with Adam? Oh yeah, that guy I'm not supposed to ask about! Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat..."

She laughs hard, and possibly revels in the fact that she's been called a sly fox. I laugh too. It feels really good to be laughing together.

Another hour goes by, and I'm sitting at my desk thinking about how I might tell this story in a blog entry. She looks at me and asks what I'm smiling about. I tell her I'm just remembering her sly way of asking if Ted is here. Her face contorts in a manner that says, give me more clues, I don't know what you're talking about. So I tell her the whole story and she enjoys it all over it again. As do I. Two good laughs before bedtime. Best medicine there is.

Clean? Or dirty?

She points to a plastic tub on the floor and says, "I don't know if those are clean or dirty. I guess I should just start over." In the tub are fluffy brown towels and a brown bed sheet. Next to the tub is an ironing board with a brown shirt on it. I consider the evidence thoughtfully. "Well," I say, "you obviously were ironing a brown shirt. It must have been clean. Everything in the tub is brown. My observation is that you typically go to the basement with dirty laundry that's all mixed up, and come back with clean laundry sorted by color. I think you separated all the brown stuff in the basement, washed it, then brought it back here. You stopped over there to iron the shirt. I say, these towels and this sheet are clean." That makes sense to her, so I go back to what I was doing.

Twenty minutes later, she says, "I guess I'm going to just wash this again. I don't know if it's clean or dirty." To which I say, "You know, it's all brown. That makes me think it's been sorted, washed, dried, and brought back here. So I say its clean." I take the shirt upstairs to hang it up. She disappears with the tub.

Several hours later she's back with the tub.

"I don't know if these are clean or dirty..."

"CLEAN!"

She takes the towels out and starts folding them on the couch. On about the third towel, she turns and says, "You know, I didn't ask to be like this..." There are tears on her cheeks.

But she was no longer asking if the laundry was clean or not.

Lunch amnesia

She's not feeling well because of a cold. I asked her if she would like to get out of the house and go to lunch, or would she rather eat here. She couldn't decide. I said if it didn't matter, I'd rather stay home and I would fix her something. I went downstairs and warmed up some leftover chicken and rice and took it to her in the living room. She said thanks, and I came back upstairs to work.

Thirty minutes later she appears in my workspace and says, "Are we going to lunch?" She can tell by the way I look at her that something is wrong. I ask her if she ate what I gave her, and she doesn't know. I walk with her downstairs to see if there's any evidence. She finds a half-eaten bowl of chicken and rice in the kitchen and holds it up for me to see. This is upsetting to her, that she ate and doesn't remember. I go back to work.

Another thirty minutes later, she shows up with her purse in hand and says, "So, when are we going to lunch?" Again she reads the look on my face. I tell her she already ate, and she remembers enough to be really upset. She's sleeping now.

***

Last night I was de-cluttering a room. I was about three-quarters finished, with a pile of stuff on the floor that needed to go to the trash or to the basement. The phone rang, and while I took the call, she decided to "help" by putting everything back on the shelves I had just emptied. I couldn't mask a slight irritation when I came back. After I had taken the stuff back off the shelves and made several trips to the garbage can and the basement, she looked at me and said, "I'm not going to get any better am I?"