It has been a while since I have blogged.
Last May 2024, I had a wonderful vendor experience in Portland, Maine with my daughter at the Maine-AEYC ECE Birth to 8 Across the State Early Childhood Education Conference. As an author of Children’s Literature stories it was so nice to find the group of people who could really appreciate my stories that I have written. I was thrilled to have lots of sales and compliments on my stories and games that I created. The educators at the conference understood and loved how I created my books to engage children in learning by involving them in my stories. I created Literacy Guides to help teachers use the book to guide them through activities that they could do with their children.
I was thankful that my daughter came to help me use the new square credit card machine to help with my sales. There were lines of teachers at my vendor table to buy books, so I learned very quickly that having a second person at a teachers conference was crucial for those two conference days and for future events with educators. I was thrilled at how well organized the conference was and was so happy that there was approximately one thousand people there. What a wonderful sale opportunity for Dragonfly Publishing!
I was literally on an “Author High” after that wonderful weekend.
I come home and on Monday I hear the worse news, that my ex-husband Tom who I was married to for 24 years had a Bi-Lateral Stroke and he is in the hospital. 🏥 I go to the hospital to see him and find out that his short term memory has been affected by the stroke. I visit with him every day and call my adult kids to tell them the news and I call his siblings too.
After a week of being in the hospital and seeing that he was going to need a lot of care the doctors recommended rehabilitation at a center where a bed just became available.
Over the next several months we visit and check in on him daily to see how he is doing. We are happy that his cognitive function is improving, but he is still having difficulty standing and walking. We are hoping and praying that physical therapy will help him regain his ability to get up and move. Unfortunately, his short term memory is still impaired.
Days turn to weeks, and weeks turn to months and friends and family continue to visit and try to encourage Tom to get better and to go to physical therapy.
Meanwhile, bills are accumulating and a Big Difficult Decision needs to be made.
As a family, we decided to start the process of getting the ten room family Farmhouse on the market. In order to do this, we need to clean out the thirty years of stuff one accumulates when you have stayed in the same house for all those years.
Stay tuned to Part II of Difficult Days & Difficult Decisions
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