Our "Man Child" and How we Cope

A couple of things happened today that made me realize that we are fortunate in our "caretaking" duties, taking care of our mentally handicapped 51 year old son James, Jr, as compared to what some other parents encounter. I watched a special with Jane Pauley talking about parents taking care of wounded veterans returning from Iraq. I watched as the mothers talked about having to quit their jobs, moving to be near their sons or daughters, and how their lives were put on hold indefinitely, maybe forever.

At least this didn't happen to James after he was grown. We've been caretakers for him all his life. We don't know what it's like not to have him around. We just take it for granted and go about our daily routine as we have done for the past 51 years.

A day in the life of James begins when one of us goes to the bathroom to start his bath water. He doesn't feel the temperature of the water and will burn or scald himself if we don't regulate the water. He wants it to be hot. He likes the tub bath; hates showers. Every couple of days I wash his hair while he's in the tub and makes sure I rinse the shampoo out. If he washes his hair, he uses too much shampoo and doesn't get the soap out. He also likes to get a bath as soon as he finishes dinner every night, and then puts on his pj's "to relax" he tells us.

We have to wash 2 or 3 sets of bed linens every morning, depending on how many times we wake up and change his bed for him. I usually wake up around 2 or 3 and again around 5. Jim sleeps through the night. So I'm the night caretaker. I can do this in my sleep!

James can dress himself and we have a hard time getting him to wear different shirts. He has dozens of shirts and he alternates between two or three favorites; Coke, Special Olympics, Alabama, Auburn and most lately, Relay for Life. He can't handle buttons so he wears knit shirts to work every day. He can't tie his tennis shoes and usually puts his socks on with the heels on top so we have to check that before tying his shoes for him.

While he's getting his bath and getting dressed, I am in the kitchen preparing his breakfast. He wants the same thing every morning: grilled cheese sandwich, a small glass of orange juice to swallow his many pills, and a big glass of 1% milk. He doesn't like for me to have the TV on for the Today Show when he is eating or waiting for the van to come. I have a little one in the kitchen if I want to watch something special, and he even complains about that one being on.

Once he finishes breakfast, his dad takes charge and helps him with grooming. He has to shave him and comb his hair and gives him drink money.

By this time, it's time for the bus to arrive to take him to Enteprise to the training center (sheltered workshop). He leaves around 8:05 a.m., Mon - Fri. and gets back home around 2:30 p.m. His favorite time at the center is "break" where they go to the dining hall, buy a soft drink, sit around and talk. He has lots of friends there. They break up into small groups and go to their designated classrooms for activities. He likes to go with his supervisor to an elementary school every morning to pick up their hot lunches which are in large serving containers. They have hot lunches every day except when schools are closed and when he takes his lunch, it's always a peanut butter sandwich, an orange cut in half, and 2 choc. chip cookies. That's all he wants.

They go outside on good days and play basketball or take short walks, or go to the park sometimes. At 2 p.m. they load the buses and come back home. Twice a month on Fri. the men go bowling and he really looks forward to that. The Pilot Club comes once a month and brings refreshments for a birthday party for all who have birthdays that month.

We sometimes wonder if we could keep our sanity if we didn't have this respite time every day.

He can hardly wait to go to work every day and doesn't want to go on vacations or miss a day for some reason.

Once he gets home in the afternoon, we have a snack prepared for him and he is usually very tired after the long ride home on the bus. He sits in his recliner and relaxes for awhile, often watching cartoons or baseball games. That's another thing we can't do without - TV. He has certain programs he watches, especially the Atlanta Braves. His TV is in the den, where we each have computers. So we are with him in sight to take care of his wants and needs.

James has many hobbies, one being his baseball card collection. He can't read or write but he can put his baseball cards in groups according to teams, years, etc. He has a remarkable memory and always reminds us when we have dental or Dr. appointments. He likes to go to the grocery store with me on Sat. He plans all week what we need to buy.

We always make sure that one of us is near James at all times to protect him and to keep him out of mischief. So after 2:30 pm, Jim and I can't do anything together outside. We have to do things together between 8:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. We have Monday designated to play golf while James is away. We take turns going on trips or to things at night. There aren't too many things we can take James to as he has a lot of fears of what might happen and is too nervous.

He's so funny and comes out with words and statements that amaze us. He has learned a lot of this from TV. Right now he is really looking forward to going to Bama Jam on June 8th and we have 3 free tickets to the first day when his favorite member of the group "Alabama", Randy Owens, will be performing. But he doesn't come on until 9 P.M. I hope I can stay awake.

This blog is much too long, but I just wanted to put what a typical day is like with James. Most of the time he feels good, despite the fact that he has kidney failure and on a lot of medication and his legs and ankles are so swollen he can't walk very far at the time. He never complains.

While putting together a slide show of pictures of our youngest son Bill for his upcoming 50th birthday party, and looking at old photos of James, I didn't realize how far he has come since he was born. He didn't walk until he was 4 and was so thin his early years. He was so unhappy most of the time for several years and cried a lot.

Right now he is in his bedroom playing Jingle Bells on his record player! He loves Christmas and it lasts all year at our house. I have to stop this blog because it's past time for his evening snack - a peanut butter sandwich which he usually asks for at 9 p.m.

Don't feel sorry for us. We have always taken care of James and it's just part of our daily routine. He brings a lot of joy and entertainment to us and we wouldn't have it any other way.

"Free Day" today

This morning I got up and looked at my desk calendar and it was blank, that is until church supper at 5:30 p.m. What a welcome relief! I needed a free day to just relax after my busy day shopping in Dothan yesterday (50 miles from home). I left home at 9 a.m. and got back at 3 p.m. I went alone and had so much fun going to Michael's, Party America, Office Depot, Big Lots, and a few others.


I had a picture framed at Michael's at 40% off. I had fun looking all over the store while I was getting the picture framed. I couldn't find a thing that I needed.


Then I spent over an hour at the party place, Party America. I shopped for decorations for the 50th birthday party for our son Bill  and daughter-in-law Cindy (Ron's wife)  on June 21. We should have planned a luau since that theme had tons of decorations. Someone said they thought several churches were using that theme for Bible School this year. They even had grass skirts. I wonder how I would look in one of those?? I'm not sure what you wear underneath. I decided to just stick with "Over the Hill"...... I bought a large helium tank that will fill 50 latex balloons. I didn't check out until I had seen every item in the store. What a fun place to shop!


I didn't want to take time out to eat so I ate my lunch which I had prepared and brought in a lunch box, along with cold bottled water, along with some snacks. I would snack between shopping.

I stopped at the Christian Mission store to see if they had a used movie screen, and they didn't. But I found a great bargain for $5 - a food dehydrator! It looks much like the one pictured here. It has several trays to hold the food and has an electric fan underneath to circulate air to the food. I want to try drying some small figs to use to make fig newtons like Mama Wilson used to make. I hope I remember how she made them. Last year I borrowed a dehydrator from my neighbor, just like the one I bought, to dry some oriental persimmons and those bright orange-red slices were so pretty. Not only good  to eat but to added to holiday wreaths. When Jim asked what I planned to do with this "gadget", I explained to him why every cook needs one of these!


Then I went to Office Depot to buy a pint can of rubber cement. You can no longer buy these big containers anyplace but in office supply places. I guess it's too popular for "glue sniffing" parties. Think of the "high" a group of kids could get with a pint. A can will last me a long time and I refill my small bottle to use for art projects. I needed the glue for 2 big photo posters I am making for the party.


I have learned to make posters and banners and it's really neat how you can print a big poster from a photo. The image is printed on 4 or 9 sheets of photo paper and you trim the edges and put it on a poster board to get the large poster. You can buy whole sheets of photo paper with adhesive backing but that's so expensive. I just use rubber cement on the back of photo paper and if I need to reposition it, it's easy to move around.


This all took place yesterday....on Tuesday.


Today - I went for a 30 minute walk in my neighborhood with my friend Pat. Then back home to read the paper, check my email, edit a membership list from DAR, and then it was time to make some lunch. After lunch, Jim went with me to the playground to water some of the 36 trees we planted over the past year. We could only water trees for an hour today. It takes over two hours to water all of them. Fertilizer is very expensive but it's worth the price. Those trees are full of healthy green leaves and growing so fast. There was a nice breeze and we had 2 hoses to use. Then we went to the old Folsom house to water flowers and fertilize 2 chiqueapin trees I planted in April. Then back home in time for me to bake an angel food cake (for us) and a coconut cake to take to a luncheon tomorrow.


Then at 5 p.m. we left to go to church supper. I stayed for Bible study and Jim and James came home. Then Jim went back at 7 for choir practice. We almost never miss going to church on Wed. night. We enjoy the food and fellowship with friends there.


What started out as a lazy day was a very productive one. But there were no scheduled times to do things and this I enjoyed. Tomorrow I will have to plant the palm tree I grew from seed. I kept thinking about that throughout the day. And I forgot to water my plants in the potting shed.


Oh, I'll think about that tomorrow. (Jim calls me Scarlet for that reason!)


P.S. Tomorrow is not a free day until after 3 p.m. I'll be up and running around 6 a.m.

And Old Mind in a High Tech World

For the past several days I have been working on a slide show to show photos of our youngest son Bill who will turn 50 in July. He did this for us on our 50th anniversary in 2003 and we marveled at the presentation, as did the rest of our relatives. 

I decided to do the same for him on his birthday, as a surprise. I started searching for old photos about a month ago and this took forever as our photos are stacked away in photo boxes, in no order whatsoever~ and the 35mm slides posed a problem. How would I get them developed into photos to use in the slide show.


Guess what! Last night I finished the slide show, even adding music from the 70's and 80's as background music. I am so proud of myself!!

I have spent many, many hours on a project that probably would have taken our computer savy sons about an hour or two.

I couldn't figure out how to add captions or titles to photos I was using as slides, so I turned to Power Point which I had used a couple of times. I had so much fun with transitions, sound effects, background colors, etc. that sometimes I lost sight of what I was supposed to be doing.

Then there was the problem of music. I got Bill's friend Dorothy to download some music from the 70s and 80s (I had no idea what was "playing" back then). She send a CD with some songs and when I played them, our son James came running over to the computer and started singing along with the oldies. He knew all of the groups or singers and the songs. I recognized the music and the beat since I had heard it a lot while the boys were growing up.

Bill and Barbara 

I thought you just clicked on "Play CD" and then, voila! There was music in the air. But not so! There's a lot you have to program into the slide show to make the music play. Ah, so many trials and errors and now I have it all worked out. Maybe I can figure out a way to link this site to the songs so you can listen to them. That might take about a month to figure out.

I would love to take some computer classes and learn to work with photos. That's another story.

Jim and I each have a computer and we network. For awhile we shared a scanner but recently he bought his own and you can scan photos from 35mm color slides. Yeah! He made my copies for me to use in Bill's slide show.

Don't say you "can't teach an old dog new tricks"; we are living proof that it can be done, and we are still learning something new every day.

Mother's Day memories

Mother's Day has come and gone for another year and I am late posting this blog. I thought about it all last week, and even located the photo to post. Then I got busy and am just now writing a tribute to my mother.

Mildred Ruth Smith Wilson was born on October 21, 1914, to Oswald Cole and Bessie Jewel Mayberry Smith. She was their 2nd daughter. Mother attended schools at Curtis, Basin and Elba. She graduated at the top of her class at Elba High School in 1933 and got married that summer to my father, James Lawrence Wilson, a farmer from the Curtis community.

I remember mother talking about her classes at Elba High School. She loved her Latin class. Most of all I think she enjoyed literature. I remember when I was growing up, that we got the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper in the mail and she loved reading the editorials. She would read the funnies to us until we were old enough to read them. I remember that she read to us "Tales of Marco Polo" and that's how I learned about China. (My playmates and I would try to dig a hole to China but we never could get through the center of the earth! Mother said China was half-way around the world.) On Christmas she gave me a book "At the Back of the North Wind" and encouraged me to read it. It was a big book and I thought I'd never finish it.

Mother enjoyed listening to radio programs in the evenings. One of her favorites when I was small was "Dr. I.Q" - a forerunner of game shows. You could send in questions and if they used your entry, you would receive a box of Milky Way candy bars. More than once her questions were used and we enjoyed the candy bars that arrived in the mail.

When I was 12 (almost 13) , and mother was expecting her 6th child, I remember how she loved listening to the Phil Harris and Alice Faye show on Sunday nights. I was not too surprised when our baby sister was born and she named her Alice Faye. Mother also had a sister named Faye. Alice was born on Halloween night, although her birth certificate has October 30 on it.

I remember that mother had a little white wooden chest that she kept the baby clothes in. As they outgrew the clothes, she folded them and put them back in the chest to use for the next baby. In between babies, she sometimes let us dress our dolls with the baby clothes.

Mother went to school during the Depression and there wasn't enough funds for her to go on to college. But she made sure that all of her 7 children would go to college.

She never worked outside the home until I started to Troy State Teachers College in 1953. Then she started to work at Covington Industries sewing factory in Opp as an Inspector. She was working there when she died 10 years later. She and daddy wanted to build a new house and she wanted to work to help furnish the new 2-story brick home.

Mother was an expert seamstress and made all of our clothes, including coats, and our panties when we were little.

She was a hard worker, always laboring at something. I remember that she always took about a 15 minute nap after lunch every day and would get up and get right back to work. She always had a big garden and we helped her plant, hoe and harvest it. How I hated picking and shelling butterbeans; didn't mind peas and beans as much. She never let anything go to waste.

Mother died suddenly of a blood clot on April 28, 1963. We were living in Bremen, GA. We were all in shock. Our mother was never sick! She was a very kind person and people loved her. This was demonstrated the day of her funeral when school closed and the plant where she worked closed so people could attend her funeral. I never saw so many cars going to the church and cemetery. And even now, when I meet someone that she worked with as I did recently, they always tell me things that she said or did and how she always helped others.

On thing I remember was the time she made me a short, white corduroy coat with a flared back and mailed it to me at Troy State. I didn't have a light winter coat but knew there wasn't money to buy one so I just got by with what I had. I opened the package when it arrived and I don't think I've ever received a gift that I appreciated more. She made the coat and when I asked where she got the beautiful fabric, she said a friend had it left over when she made a garment and brought mother the scraps. Someone else gave her some cotton fabric that she used for the lining. My Aunt Barbara made large covered buttons for the coat. I treasured that coat for many years.

After I was married and living away, she wrote to us every week, telling us about what they were doing back home. These letters kept me from getting home sick when in college and when Jim and I were living in Germany for 2 years. I still have a letter that she wrote and put in the mail box the Sunday afternoon before she died later that same afternoon. The letter was in our mail box when we got back home in GA after attending the funeral.

Bill, Ronnie, and James Gilmer with grandparents, Lawrence and Ruth Wilson

Our boys enjoyed visiting mother and daddy at the farm in the summertime. She only had 6 grandchildren when she died; later there were 13 more.

Mother liked to can vegetables, make all kinds of jellies, jams and preserves and later when she got a freezer, would try to fill it during the summer. I didn't inherit her love for doing all of this but some of my sisters did. I like buying my frozen food in the grocery store, or getting fresh veggies at roadside curb markets in the summer, already shelled!

I think that if I could sum up how I remember my mother, it would be "a loving, caring mother who wanted the best for her children". She was a great encourager.

My brother Perry and his little red fire truck

Perry, Christine, Nell holding Judy, Sue

I came across this old photo of our only brother, Perry, when he was 2 years old. (He didn't like having his picture made when he was little.)  Santa brought him this red fire truck for Christmas and I think our daddy was more excited than he was on Christmas Day.

Daddy spent many hours repairing this metal toy and painting it. In 1944, you couldn't buy metal toys and he found this one that had been well used, and restored it. It was beautiful and Perry loved the bell that he could ring by pulling a string. We all took turns pushing him around in the fire truck when he got tired of pedaling.

This photo was taken in the front yard of Mama and Papa Wilson's house where we lived with them until the fall of 1944. We moved to a rental house about 1/2 mile away just before our sister Judy (shown here) was born on New Year's Day, 1945.

It was probably Easter 1945 when this photo was made. I'm guessing that we spent the day with Mama and Papa Wilson, even bringing Perry's fire truck so he could ride in in their big yard. 

I had just turned 10 in this picture and remember well the red and white stripe rayon dress I am wearing. Mother made it from a dress my aunt sent from Washington, DC. She would gather up nice clothing from her friends and send it to mother to use to make clothes for us. Fabric was not available due to war shortages. We always had nice clothes to wear because our mother was so creative and a very good seamstress.

My sister Christine is on the left side of the photo, I'm in the middle - holding baby Judy, and on the right side is my sister Susan (Sue). Alice and Carolyn came along later. Perry was the only boy in the family.

Only God can make a tree!

Our home when we moved in in Nov 2003

Our home 3 years later

I love trees and forests and lakes. When we moved into our present home in Elba, AL, there was not a single tree or bush or anything in our yard, just 2 acres of clay soil with wild grass and weeds. We had left behind 80 acres of pine trees, lots of hardwood trees in the woods, a lake and spring. We were so weary of taking care of our farm that we wanted to move to town and have a small city lot. But the only house we could find that fit into our plans was in the middle of two city lots! We moved into it in the winter of 2003 and in 2004 we began to landscape the new yard.

The bermuda grass lawn looks nice in the summer months but turns brown in the winter. We have a nice crop of weeds in the spring before the bermuda starts to turn green. We planted a lot of trees in 2004 and now 4 years later they look like they have been here forever. Some are now providing shade. Many of the shrubs I propagated after we moved here. It's exciting to watch them grow. Our only disaster was the banana bush that grew so fast and so big we had to dig it up. We put the big roots in a gulley behind our house and I expect any day to see a "banana forest" in that area!

back porch

I have a potting shed where I propagate plants and keep them watered. I have been giving away muscadine and concord grape vines this spring. Have lots of crepe myrtles to pass along.


My Master Gardening knowledge is so helpful.

Autumn Blaze Maple 2004

Autumn Blaze maple fall 2005

swing arbor we built 2005

Swing Arbor 1 year later

Welcome to my garden!

This morning when the early morning sun was shining on the dew laden flowers in our yard, I went outside and took some photos to share. I tried to capture the pink climbing roses on the wooden fence but you can't see the overall beauty in a photo. Nor can you smell the sweet fragrance of the antique roses. I like to cut them and make bouquets for church, friends, etc and keep some on our breakfast table to enjoy. I also root these roses to give away.
(Click small photos to enlarge)

Sweet Shrub bush

I planted a sweet shrub near our outdoor swing so I can smell them. But there's a problem with this bush. It is not from the wild, but given to me by a friend who bought it a nursery, and it doesn't have the sweet perfumey smell as those taken from the woods. I might replace it or add another variety nearby. At least the tea olive bush (tree) fills the air with the best smelling perfume around, several times a year. We are letting it grow into a tree.

The purple blooms of the clematis welcome us as we walk out the back door, as it climbs up a post on the corner of the porch. It blooms most of the summer, a few big blooms at the time.

The purple iris have had a good spring. Once there were over 2 doz blooms in the corner of our back yard bulb flower bed. I guess the gladiolas will be blooming next in that flower bed.

The geranium on the back porch was purchased this spring for $10 and I've never gotten such a bargain! It has been blooming ever since March. Might be because I feed it Schultz bloom fertilizer.

Near the geranium is a flower bed of hostas. They love the shade along the porch and add texture and color to the cement porch.

Our window boxes are filled with old fashioned petunias from the yard of my friend Glenda Williams. She gave me these before she moved to Geneva this spring. I put pots of plants in the window boxes so I can take them out and replace them when they begin to look bad.

The little yellow coreopsis are blooming all over the yard. These hardy perennials come back every year and are drought resistant. The bees and butterflies love them, as do the hummingbirds.

I hope you have enjoyed a tour of flowers blooming in our yard on May 1, 2008.