Sofa nights

After Snowy goes to bed (usually between 4 and 5:30), which during the work week is usually hours before I come home (usually between 6:30 and 7 or so), I will sometimes sit in her recliner in the evening to eat something and watch some TV with Chick.

Chick, depending on the longness and exhaustion of the day, may have staked a claim to reclining on the sofa, so I happily leave that to her and recline in Snowy’s chair.

It’s a nice chair that we found on craigslist a few months ago, a lady’s sized recliner in a nice turquoisey green that has a feature folks recommended to us — in addition to reclining back it is also a lift chair. This comes in handy on those days when it is hard for Snowy to remember how to make her legs work to stand up.

I haven’t used the lift feature for myself (yet) — except those occasions when I accidentally sit on the control and mash the UP button and find myself being whirled into catapult position.

But on the Saturday night/Sunday mornings when I’ve been taking the put-to-bed/ get-up-with-in-the-morning duty, I do end up sleeping on the sofa so that I will be HERE for when Snowy is ready to get up for the day.

For a long time she would sleep until 11 AM to even 2 or so PM. But in the last month or two she has had a reversion to the decades and decades where she was the earliest riser and up and out and making the day ready for everyone. Not that she is doing that any more, but she suddenly began getting up around 7 to 7:30 AM (hence, 4, 4:30, 5 PM is not such an off-the-wall time for bed to be calling her back).

Chick was always getting up early so that she had some time to get things done that she was working on, writing, connecting, getting some cleaning done, so she was really surprised when that month or so ago she heard an unexpected sound over the baby monitor from Snowy’s room.

“Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss. PPPPSSSssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss. Psssss. Pssssssssssssssss. Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.”

Hair spray.

Snowy was up and intending to stay up for awhile.

It was really interesting for her clock to reset like that, and a good thing for her to get up and be up in the daylight hours. And infinitely better than the several days during the weeks I was home “eldersitting” when that UNroutine situation had her going to bed and sleeping for @23 hours at a time.

Adaptable, wonderful Chick adapted their days to this new pattern, and it does mean that I get to see Snowy every morning before I head in to work, because it has been rare indeed that she has stayed up long enough for me to see her after work.

But it also means that Chick needs to have a day every once in a while that SHE gets to sleep a little bit and not go right on duty and care.

So, now I’ve circled back in my musings here to the point of my Saturday nights on the sofa after I’ve gotten Snowy to bed but on watch for when she gets up on Sunday morning. Part of the routine is to get the morning pills out and ready in the bathroom with a fresh cup of water, having a soft light on in the bathroom for guidance as needed overnight, being ready with a Boost + in the morning as well as aid in a few of the items she sometimes needs help with in dressing, and a sturdy arm to help her out to her chair and getting set up for the day’s sharing.

Funny, when I have fallen asleep on the sofa from watching a show late at night, that sofa is so comfortable and embracing I have NO desire to climb up from it to stumble back to my room on the other side of the house.

But intentionally sleeping there (as I did in the aggregate 5 weeks I was the substitute carer while Chick was at the northeast clinic), it is not as welcoming. I had to come up, through trial and error, with several tricks to make it embrace me again and give me a modicum of rest. And suddenly it has shrunk in length so my feet hang over the end.

And now when I wake up I need to reach for the Excedrin (or generic equivalent) because my back is aching, my hips are aching, my arms, my legs, my head… I am falling a bit apart. But I have usually slept well (it’s the sans kitties thing, I believe!) and more deeply than I do in my room.

I woke up with a start, listened and heard nothing but a few “buy me buy me buy me” from an infomercial from the left-on tv. I grabbed my Excedequivalent, listened some more, ran the pills in to the bathroom and poured the fresh water to go with it, got the Boost + out of the fridge and had it by the recliner, then I peeked in to Snowy’s room to see if she was ready to get up.

Bless us. She had (as in most of my life) beat me up, dressed, made her bed, and curled right back up on top of it and gone back to sleep. Shortly after, though, she was back up, headed to the bathroom, taking her pills, and then Chick followed a flying Charlie down the stairs and the day started with all of us happily together.

I’m looking at the sofa right now as I write and wondering how I feel about lying back down on it to saw some logs (Chick not only assures me I saw logs, she has recorded me doing so and gleefully played it back to undercut my denials).

As much as I’d like to go the shorter distance and give in to the leather whooosh of stretching out there again, I am pretty sure I am going to head back to my little bed with all the foam toppers and featherbed, and length long enough where my feet don’t go up on an arm — and 4 kitties are waiting for me.

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p.s. We watched 2 movies this afternoon that had come in from Netflix, both interesting and recommendable. 1 was Being Jane, with Anne Hathaway and James Macavoy, about Jane Austin when she was about 20 years old. The other was Across the Universe with known people in some cameos – a very novel film/ musical set entirely with Beatles’ music and an anti-Vietnam War message a la Hair, written by the lady who created all the imagery for The Lion King.