Things are still going poorly with Mom. She transferred into the residential treatment facility on Tuesday. She's miserable, not sleeping well, and begging me to take her out. I had a decent converstation with her new social worker and he reassured me that she can only be released with the psychiatrist's permission. If she insists on getting out and they feel she's a danger to herself, they will Baker Act her. Essentially, even a voluntary admission into mandates completing the full 2-3 month program. They will keep her for up to 6 months, and if she's still not well, she will be placed in an appropriate hospital or group home. She now knows this and is afraid that's what will happen. I'm repeating the same stuff over and over to her: make getting well a goal, don't worry about money, housing, and whatever, just focus on getting well, we will have a living situation arranged when she is released, but won't work on it until she's well enough for release, and that the possibility of moving into an apartment isn't the end of the world. Apparently if she doesn't own her residence, it's automatically no good.

Hubby worked approximately 24 hours this weekend. So much for spending Easter together. They had a murder, a suicide, an overdose, and another death, I think. Horrible stuff. We're both about ready to crack - him from work stress and me from Mom and family stress. I hoped for some quality alone-time to decompress and never got it. Peanut and I visited Mom yesterday and it was awful. He fell asleep on the way there and woke up in a clingy/unhappy mood. The facility scared him and Mom just made it worse with her crying. He clung to me and asked for bye-bye and juice the whole 20 minutes we were there. Mom took it personally when he didn't want to sit on her lap or hug her. Then she started laying into me with a big guilt trip about not visiting on weeknights until I explained the logistics: Hubby is on call and can't be relied upon to pick Peanut up. Visiting hours don't start until 6:30, so if I can drive there straight from work, I'll have a 45 minute wait. If I pick up Peanut, then drive to her, I'm spending a good 90 minutes driving, have to somehow squeeze dinner in, then have a 45 minute drive home. It's not happening.

I hope that somehow this program works for her as well as it did last time and that once she gets out she accepts whatever her living arrangements are.

I've been trying not to lose sight of the good things.

Peanut had a blast yesterday. We didn't play Easter up too much, but daycare had a party and egg hunt. When we woke up, I told him the Easter Bunny had visited and we should look for presents. He loved the kitchen set Hubby and I got and "cooked" all day long. He also loved the basket with a stuffed bunny from Grammy and Grampy, as well as the Pingu DVD, which we've already watched 3 times. He insisted on me sitting next to the kitchen for a good bit of the day so he could give me coffee, hotdogs and hamburger patties. "I cook, Mommy!"

We took a break from cooking to water the flowers and play in the backyard last night. I noticed one of our mockingbirds with a worm, anxiously eyeballing their nesting tree. I asked Peanut to be quiet and still so we wouldn't scare away the mommy bird. Once she (or he) flew into the tree, we heard "peeppeeppeeppeeppeep." I'm pretty sure the eggs hatched Saturday or Sunday as we didn't hear any peeps Saturday morning.