That’s all I wanted to say, was “NO.” When it comes to household chores and activities I’m not your typical male. I can cook, clean, do above average general home repairs (I finished my own basement), laundry, grocery shopping, paying bills and I’ve even been known to bake once in a blue moon. I can look forward to many things each and every day. What I didn’t look forward to was planning meals. I’m a manager of teams and volunteers but I could not wrap my head around what are we going to have for supper for the next 5-7 days! Now being a typical dad, when mom goes out for a night or a few days, I will settle on pizza, BBQing, McDonald’s and all the other typical dad meals when mom is not home. Like most dad’s, I will threaten my brood into silence about not telling mom what we have eaten while she was away. It sometimes works, but most times doesn’t.

The problem with this recent situation was that my wife was going into hospital for somewhere between 4-6 weeks. I don’t think I could handle the typical dad meals for more that three days let alone for 4-6 weeks. What was I going to do?

I pulled a a group of close friends and family together, four couples in all, and we talked over dinner and put a plan together. All of this took place before my wife went in to hospital so that she could be part of the discussion but also so that she could rest in hospital knowing her family was being taken car of as well. This group became our advocacy team and spoke on behalf of my family situation to others and communicated on our behalf as well.

Here’s what we decided:
- One night a week @ friends for dinner.
- One night a week a meal would be brought over. (More were brought over and stored in our freezer.)
- This group also provided gift cards for gas, groceries, restaurants, coffee, and many other things that they collected from others.

Now that took care of two nights a week but what about the other 5? I decided to pull a cook book off the shelf and what I didn’t realize was that this book was going to revolutionize my meal planning life in a way I had never imagined.

This book gives you 10 weeks of recipes for 5 days. Now the portion size is for a larger family than my three but we had left overs and loved 95% of all the meals in here. Now the best part of this book is that it also gives you a shopping list for that week. The only things that I had to do was add anything else to the list that we needed as well as take anything off the list that we already had in the house. It was that easy.

Each recipe tells you how long it should take from prep to table. Let’s you see how it should look (I never achieved this one). Some meals needed preparation the night before but most didn’t. And it gets better!

Sandi Richard has multiple books. And it gets better!

When you go to her website: Cooking for the Rushed, click on the grocery list tab and you can download and print the grocery list for that week off your printer. It is in PDF form and I would have loved one I could edit but that’s a convenience I can live without.

Now we have a life threatening allergy in our home so I would have to substitute or just subtract some items but anything you do for your family needs to fit them.

As a family we would rate the meals as “Keepers or Jeepers.” Keepers we would have again and Jeepers we would mark in the book so we would not make it again.

As a family we would not follow these meals everyday. We always had a frozen pizza we could use or go out for convenience  to McDonald’s. What this system did for me was simplify things on an ongoing basis. Something I didn’t like to do in the past, I now enjoy.

Parenting tip: I would not make multiple meals for anyone in our home no matter what age they were. What I made, we ate. I was not going to be a short-order cook for anyone. If they went to bed hungry, they always had a big breakfast the next day and they learned to eat what was prepared.

(Editor’s Note: Today, we welcome our newest blogger, Donna W., who cares for her mom.)

To escape, to have respite, take a vacation, however you would define the luxury of getting away, it has a much different definition and result for a caregiver.

I have been able to get away at least once a year since I started caring for mom. That isn’t very much, but it has become what is  normal for me. For my husband and I to go anywhere more then a few hours  involves a great deal of planning and preparation. That task is enough to make me stay here and not go!

But, I manage to pull it all together and we leave. I have lived an isolated  life here since caring for mom, getting out sometimes only once a month sometimes not even that. The norm for me would be at least once every two weeks. My “radar” is always tuned into what mom is or isn’t doing, whether she is sitting in the wheel chair, in the front room, or in bed in her room, no matter what time of day or night it is, that is my norm.

Now you would think I would relax and enjoy wherever I was going, whatever I was doing? No.  Why? Because I have left all that is normal to me and my daily routine, my  normal environment, my normal eat and sleep schedule, not to mention what I sleep on.

The sights and sounds elsewhere are foreign and even unsettling. Getting away takes me out of my normal  24/7 on-call, round-the-clock way of life and put into the normal routine  of someone else’s life. It is not comfortable, it should be, but it’s not.

Speaking for myself, I am not comfortable going  somewhere else, and I am always anxious to get back to my normal.  As much as this home has become my prison and caregiving my jailer, this is also where I feel secure. It is difficult to just sit and do nothing somewhere, to not feed someone, change them, listen to them whine, even missing all the emotions and frustrations that are a part of each day.

Even though there is a desperate need to go away at times and have what others call normal take place for awhile, I can’t really relax and enjoy it because I do not relate to or respond well to others’ normal lives anymore.  I don’t know how I will begin again and adapt to what others call normal once mom has left us.