I’m becoming a skilled artisan, and my craft is spoon-feeding people who can’t feed themselves. 

I have dabbled at spoon-feeding various people at various times over the years, but I’ve taken it to an entirely new level here at the nursing home, spoon feeding one of the residents three meals a day, day in and day out for the past 3 months. Estimating 30 minutes per meal, that’s 90 minutes per day, times 90 days, totals over 100 hours. Still far short of the commitment called for per the “10,000 hour rule”, but I guess spoon feeding someone is not quite as difficult as playing the chess or dancing tango or performing open-heart surgery or something complicated like that.

Anyway, if I get much better at this spoon-feeding gig, people who can actually eat perfectly well with their own hands may begin asking me to feed them too.  It’s my new idea for a personal service business – I think I’d rather be a pro spoon feeder than a masseur or a manicurist.  Especially since some smart engineers have already invented a robot to give nail manicures.

I know they’re working on this too, but I think it’s gonna be a few years before they invent a robot that can spoon feed grandma better than than I can.

Lately I’ve been helping Grandmother Nina with her meals.  Maybe after Afdandil returns, I’ll do “split shifts” so I can help them both.  I can sit with Afdandil during the regular meal hour, because he finishes more quickly, and then sit with Grandma Nina afterward, so she can spend as much time as she needs to have a nice meal.  

For lunches and dinners, Grandmother Nina is pretty much eating a special diet now anyway. She doesn’t care for any food that has pieces, chunks, strands, grains or pretty much any other texture.  She might gum something for a little while, but if she can work it forward to the tip of her tongue, she’ll spit it out.  For example, this morning we had a porridge of millet cooked in milk (actually, slightly past-date powdered infant formula).  The millet retained a grainy texture in the milk.  Because the porridge was pretty “runny”, Grandmother Nina gulp-swallowed most spoonfuls.  But for some of the larger scoops, she actually had to hold the porridge in her closed mouth and swallow twice.  This left some millet grains “stranded” between her gums and cheeks, and she spent quite a bit of effort using her tongue to move those grains forward so she could spit them out.  Miraculously, she only choked a couple of times.

Speaking of choking, Grandma Nina’s most dangerous activity is drinking.  She likes to drink from a cup, and she likes to hold the cup herself (with assistance from me, to make sure she doesn’t drop it).  The problem is, once she gets going, she won’t stop until the cup is empty or she starts choking, whichever happens first. Most of the time, she winds up choking.  I’ve learned this pattern, so now I watch closely, and after she takes two swallows I insistently tip the cup down so she can “take a breather.”  This seems to work pretty well.  After she takes a breath, she’s usually ready and able to take another drink.  She’s a guzzler, not a sipper, but at least she’s catching a breath between gulps.

Soups are difficult because they consist of chunks of vegetables and meat in clear broth.  Nina won’t do anything with the chunks, so she ends up just getting sips of clear broth.  Usually I tear up a slice of bread and soak it in the broth.  The bread is like a sponge soaking up the broth, and it disintegrates into a smooth slurry in her mouth so it’s easy to swallow. But sometimes she even spits out little lumps of soggy bread.

The kitchen usually serves soup for lunch and a grain or pasta casserole for dinner almost every day.  Sometimes the casserole is palatable for her, but often we have the same difficulty with chunks (which is where most of the nutrients are).  I’ve learned to use a food processor to puree some of the lunch soup and serve pureed soup at dinner together with the casserole, in case the casserole doesn’t go down well with her.  This seems to be working alright.  Sometimes I even bring two or three kinds of soup which I can blend by the spoonful until I get just the right combination, like a painter creating colors on a palette.

It’s important to get the consistency just right, so it mounds up a little bit on the spoon, but still slides off easily into her mouth and is easy to swallow.  She fusses a lot, but she is still anxious to eat and drink something at each meal, so I think she’s getting enough calories.

Speaking of fussing, sometimes she does talk a lot, but I can’t understand much of what she’s saying.  For instance, today she was fussing about something as I was trying to help her take a sip of tea.  All of a sudden the lady in the neighboring bed looked up and started gesturing with her hand. She picked up her own tea cup to show what she meant – and it dawned on me that perhaps Grandma Nina was asking to hold the cup herself.  Sure enough, I put the cup in her hand and she immediately brought the cup up to her lips. It’s wonderful to have helpful neighbors. 

I wish I could understand both Nina and her neighbor better. So I’m working away at my Ukrainian. That’ll take 10,000 hours at least! In spare time (between bites), I’m also working on rattlin’ bones like the spoon lady: