Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Some Hope for Mom to Stay at Her Own Home?
I visited Mom at the hospital again on Saturday, after first spending much of my time at her home in Keswick, cleaning and tidying up. One of the nurses/mental health assessors approached me while I was meeting with her and said that she had seen considerable improvement in her mental state, and that Mom was now consistently remembering to deal with her oxygen properly. Then she suggested that they would like to have Mom’s state assessed in her own house, to see just how well she could cope. At best, this could mean that she would get assistance to live at her own home, or perhaps have her own house as a place to wait until a room at a retirement home (rather than a nursing home) becomes available.

This would involve me going up for a weekend and essentially letting Mom do “all of the work”, which will be hard for me to do. In any event Erika and I have made plans for this coming weekend to clean-up and “rationalize” the house, in other words, packing up and otherwise getting rid of a lot of stuff, originally with the goal of setting thing up for selling the house, but now with the idea of making the home easier to live in for Mom. In order to get signing authority over Mom’s bank account, I have planned to go in person to her local bank branch on Friday afternoon, since I discovered last weekend it is not open on weekends. (Great.) I’ll stay there overnight, while Erika comes up the next day with our dust-filtering vacuum cleaner as well as a bunch of plastic packing boxes. I am also planning on meeting with a real estate rep in order to find out what the value of the house/property is, and whether or not it is worthwhile sinking money into the house in order to increase its value and make it more saleable (worthwhile doing even if Mom stays in the house).

Much work to be done!

Seeing the Asian Dinos at the ROM
I haven’t written for a while, so here’s my chance to catch up with things. I took a few hours off of work last Thursday in order to accompany Erika and Vanessa as they went to the ROM to see the new Asian Dinosaur Exhibit along with Iain and Ariel. They were staying with us since Erika had the room in the truck to bring them back from Lansdowne when she left Jenny and Hugh’s a couple of days after New Years.

Iain, who is 6, had never been to Toronto before, and Ariel, who is 8, had never been to the ROM. So off we went to the exhibition.

It was a relatively short visit, and not wholly successful. We knew there would be crowds, but we hoped that by leaving early we’d beat the rush. No such luck. As members of the ROM at least we didn’t have to wait outside in the long lineup for getting into the exhibit, but once in you had to queue up to get a good look at the exhibits. The exhibit itself was “okay”, and not really up to the star-level exhibit the promo hype would suggest. I may be being overcritical here, as the crowds considerably reduced my enjoyment of the exhibit. And while there are some impressive specimens on show, it was a smaller exhibit than I expected. In additional Ariel and especially Iain seemed overwhelmed by the crowds and didn’t seem to get much out of it.

Prior to heading out I gave both kids $5 in spending money for the ROM, in the hope that they’d find something they liked at that price. As it turned out, there wasn’t much available at that price. In the end they both picked out 3D dino puzzles, and a slightly overwhelmed Iain wanted a dino book worth more than 3 times as much money as he had (in the end I relented and bought it for him – I don’t think he really knows much about the value of money as yet). While the selection of dino-related things were good –especially the book section – I was sometimes appalled at the prices as for selected items. One in particular stands out: a “catalog” of the exhibit, which was not much more substantial than a detailed brochure, which had an asking price of $23. Ouch!

The most enjoyable experience of our outing ended up being in the gallery adjacent to the exhibit, where Vanessa did some colouring (courtesy of a dino-themed erasable colouring sheet bought for her by Erika) and the two kids tried to assemble their model dinos (Ariel did her own successfully, but in the end I had to do the other one for Iain). The trip ended up being something of a fiasco, but which I think was made up in the end by a screening of several episodes of the Walking with Dinosaurs DVD at home later that day.

The visit of Ariel and Iain to our place was good, and while for the most part they were okay, it was exhausting. What I found interesting was the contrast between a nearly 4-year-old Vanessa and the older, visiting kids. She is very much the “little girl” in comparison to them – not as self-possessed or willful, though that will undoubtedly change over time. It was the difference in maturity (though not necessarily behaviour ;-) that I noticed in having Iain and Ariel over, and it reminded both Erika and myself that if Vanessa does occasionally get over-emotional, to remember that she is still not even 4 yet. All of this is really all the more reason to cherish this time in her life.