Day 218, Friday, August 6th, 2021
Cleaning Out the Purse
(Posting 4 days late because Anna’s still going through a rough spell.)
I don’t change purses very often (mostly because I only have one real purse at the moment), but I wanted to take my camera bag out last weekend and needed a few items from my purse. It’s always a surprise what you find at the bottom of a bag… like missing sunglasses or a piece of candy! None of my bags really work well for my needs, I should remedy that.
Day 219, Saturday, August 7th, 2021
No photos today. Curtis and I were supposed to go listen to Nightbird at the Blue Bonnet Palace but we were so tired and defeated from dealing with Anna that we decided to stay home.
Day 220, Sunday, August 8th, 2021
Mangled Glasses
I was out of the house for a short time and Anna was already fragile when I left. She’s still super stuck on her great Uncle Bill. She had spam texted grandma earlier in the week about Bill so we had to take her phone away. Dad had said maybe she would never get her phone back (really to see if she would accept not talking to Bill for a while) but it backfired and Anna got super upset. She went to her room and tore it apart. Emptied her dressers, threw stuff on the floor, cursed, and raged. She broke her glasses then found her Flexon glasses (supposedly unbreakable) and twisted them in an unusable shape. Luckily I still had one other pair stashed away but I didn’t let her have access to them until Monday. Sigh. I feel bad for her but I’m so tired.
Day 221, Monday, August 9th, 2021
At Visionworks Again
Both pairs of frames were unfixable but the lenses were salvageable. Patricia, the lovely manager of Visionworks, knows Anna and her cycles of behavior issues. She gave me the contact info for the Flexon frames and said I would need to message them directly since we had them longer than a year. Then she said that they didn’t have the other frames anymore but if I wanted to leave the lenses, she would try to find another frame with the same shape so we would only have to purchase the frame. I got a call within a few hours that they found a match and they were ready to pick up. What an angel.
Day 222, Tuesday, August 10th, 2021
No photos today. We did pick up Anna’s new frames, they are a lovely blue.
Day 223, Wednesday, August 11th, 2021
Connect Four with Dominic
Curtis and I have been wanting to tour Daymark Living in Waxahachie ever since we heard about it two years ago. It’s a real community for adults with intellectual disabilities. After this last rough weekend with Anna, we wanted to see what this place was like. We can’t imagine Jenny or Dominic having to deal with this level of need after we are gone, we have to help Anna achieve some kind of semi-independent (with assistance) life that she is excited about.
Anyway, we packed up Wednesday afternoon and headed to Waxahachie. Much to our surprise, Dominic wanted to come with us. After we got settled in our hotel rooms, we got on Yelp and picked a place to eat. Unfortunately it was a large open space with a baby at a nearby table and Anna was a big fat NOPE. So we had to leave after ordering drinks with apologies to the staff. Then we found Milano’s Pizza, a small pizzeria near historic downtown. There was only one other table taken and they had some games including this oversized Connect Four. Dominic ended up beating me twice, I’m just so distracted and tired.
Day 224, Thursday, August 12th, 2021
Daymark Living Cottages
The Daymark Living tour was scheduled for 11 am and it was awesome. Our official tour guide was Erika and one of the residents named Becky joined us a couple of times. First impressions were that the campus is big; it’s very clean, modern, and pretty; and that the residents all seem very happy and friendly. They have 3 main buildings: one housing the cafeteria, another classrooms, and the third recreation areas. They have a resort sized swimming pool and a regulation sized basketball court. Then surrounding the main campus are the resident cottages. They have 2, 3, and 4 bedroom cottages. Each resident gets their own private bedroom, closet, and en-suite bathroom and they share the kitchen, living room, and laundry with their roommate(s). They currently have 75 residents with room for 200. They offer all sorts of classes every day from career development, communication and relationships (and yes they are allowed to have boyfriends on campus but cannot live together), community, culinary, health and wellness, household management, leadership and self-advocacy, money management, and technology. They have a packed daily schedule with social time and fun activities too.
Day 224, Thursday, August 12th, 2021
Anna in the Living Room
Anna seemed to really like the campus. She brought her newborn reborn baby, Zachary, and several of the residents knew about reborns. One stopped to talk to Anna for a long time and even held Zachary for a while. Anna was nervous in the cafeteria and the recreation building because of the noise and activity level but did well walking around the rest of the facility. Here she is sitting in one of the model cottages where they have the living room decorated. It would be years before we could make this kind of transition, but it’s good for all of us to have goals. Daymark Living is expensive, running $3800 a month but that does includes everything. So Curtis and I have a lot of financial planning to do. And we have to figure out how that would impact the services we are about to start with HCS. Anna needs to start having overnights away to get used to being without us and most importantly, she has to get her behavior under better control. They don’t accept residents with major behavior problems. Curtis and I want to talk to the founder about how he got Daymark Living started, specifically with investors and funding. We would love to build something like this in Central Texas so we can stay close to Jenny. Jenny and Wyatt will be building on a nice patch of land on his family’s ranch in Georgetown.
Thanks for looking!
