I am fortunate enough to live in my own home. My son in law and friends built it to my specifications seven years ago. So far I am able to get along with a personal care attendant for 3 to 4 hours in the morning, and then 1 hour in the evening. I have two mentally retarded adults that live with me, and I am a good supervisor so can instruct them what to do to finish dinner etc.
I have very carefully built up a large network of people that I can call on in case of emergency, and my youngest set of grandchildren live with their mom 50% of the time, so they are in and out all the time when they are with their mother. We carefully set everything out before my PCA leaves in the morning-a drink that I can drive up to, my laptop with voice recognition, my environmental control unit so that I can open the doors or turn on TV if I want to, my old desktop computer with a mouth stick, my cell phone, a couple of snacks that I can drive up to and lean forward (for the most part it works) and get a snack, and most important for me a book to read with my mouth stick positioned correctly. Even so, there are days when the time just drags by between 8:30 AM and 4:00 PM when somebody comes back to the house. Luckily we are usually in the midst of a building project of some sort, so I do a lot of designing in my mind, and when I have it pretty well laid out I go to the old computer and draw it out. As my mother in law always said "if you would stop thinking so much we all would have a lot less to do". It's still pretty true, but so far I still wake up with projects to do and a whole mess of things to look up on the Internet that I thought up during the night. Life is still exciting, and I am not ready to let go. Joan What you do for yourself dies with you. What you do for others, lives forever.
