Don’t panic! This isn’t about what you think it is.
Yesterday afternoon, I had my office windows open because it was a beautiful August day. Seventy-eight degrees with a gentle breeze. Felt more like May or September than August but I’m not complaining! It could just as easily be north of one-hundred degrees!
Annnyway, I hear the FedEx truck pull up and I know Mom’s been on Chewy.com and is expecting a box. We don’t really have a problem with porch pirates here but I still don’t like to leave things sit out there, annnnd I didn’t want him to ring the doorbell. Mom and Charli are napping, as they do every afternoon.
So I go out to greet the FedEx guy who I now see is lugging not just a Chewy box, but another larger and heavier box that looks distinctly like a box we got last week.
*Sigh*
As Mom’s forgetfulness increases, we have two recurring online ordering problems. One is that she doesn’t always understand what she reads and orders a wrong size of something. The other is that she doesn’t think she’s pushed the buy button if something doesn’t appear within a day and she’ll go again, or she forgets she’s ordered and orders again.
Since she was asleep, it was hard to say if that’s what happened until she woke up, so I left it on the front porch because his it’s only 40 pounds Ma’am is heavy to me. Besides if they need to come back and get it, may as well leave it there. At least that’s my thinking at the moment.
So that’s the story of my life, and that’s life with parents who have varying degrees of dementia. The second half of the equation is that I had to keep Dad from trying to bring it in every time he went to the bathroom and could see it on the porch. He can’t physically lift it, but he didn’t need to throw his back out either.
While he can’t order online anymore, she is proficient at it. When he wants to order something, usually a book these days, he asks for help and I order it for him. The beauty and sadness of his ordering a book is that he can’t remember what he’s read so he keeps starting over.
The ending was as I expected. This was a duplicate item and now I have to figure out how to get this 40-something pound box into my car and shipped back. It’s anybody’s guess whether she ordered it twice or if they messed up and sent it twice, but she was billed twice so we’ve requested a return and refund. Thank goodness it was Amazon!