Let's get cookin'

I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for your prayers for Shirley. Her operation went well and she is recovering well at home. Probably the most frustrating thing for her is simply all the things she is not allowed to do: no reaching up, no bending down, no lifting of anything heavy (which I interpret for her to be anything). It is amazing how much of your normal daily life this impacts. And Shirley is a very active, very serving woman (as any of you who know her personally already know).

This means that she cannot have the dog, Snuffles, up in her lap in the morning, as she does almost every morning. She can’t put her own clothes on. When we go shopping she has to ask me to pick things up and put them in the wagon. And she can’t cook dinner - our refrigerator is low, which would mean bending down and lifting things out of the fridge. All of the cabinets are either high or low.

Perhaps that could have been a perk, but what it has meant is that I have to cook. Now, I have cooked before – I worked at Godfather’s pizza and Wendy’s, so I know how to throw some food together (sometimes literally). I was looking forward to learn some real cooking. But it has been a challenging week. Perhaps you know that a husband should not be the one to teach his wife how to drive. I believe some of the same dynamics come in to play when the husband is learning to cook. But we are surviving – and I am learning to cook.

This week Shirley will be allowed (she has 6 weeks of recovery) to do a little bit more. Tomorrow the stitches come out of her neck and she hopes to be a little bit more mobile. It is hard to be patient. She is chomping at the bit, ready to go. I am trying to be patient (mostly with myself) and starting to enjoy a lot of this cooking stuff. Pretty soon, together, we will really be cooking!