"Mise en place" - Everything in its place

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Call 866-WINASIA or to see chickens and other animals to donate, go to CritterCampaign.org. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. I am Peter Rosenberger. This is the nation's number one show for you as a family caregiver. How are you holding up? How are you doing? 877-655-6755. And as always with me is himself, John Butler, the man who's so tall he doesn't even understand the concept of the deep end of the pool.

He is awesome and he is here. Are you calling me shallow? I'm just calling you tall, baby, just calling you tall.

All right, John, I'm going to throw a couple things out to you. Something I've learned, we live in a tiny house now. How tiny?

It's so small you have to eat a large pizza outside. But we downsized and we downsized quite a bit. And the concept about caregivers, something changed with me when we started doing this. And I kind of developed a mantra here with Gracie as we made this decision to leave our home in Nashville. We're in a 135-year-old cabin that's been renovated three times too many.

And the first time really didn't need it. It needed to be blown up. But we begged Gracie's dad. It's on the property. We begged him to let us burn it down.

But he said, no, no, no. So we've renovated it and it's very tiny and it's functional and it's got everything we need in it. But here's the thing. And I think this applies to caregivers. Everything has a purpose. Everything has a place.

And I have that is when I was in our home in Nashville, we had a lot more space there. And I, you know, sometimes things would just get left out or we'd have clutter or something, but you can't do that here. It's like being on a ship, you know, and if it's all put away and it's tidy, then it looks like it looks great.

But if it's not, then it gets really cluttered very fast. And I thought for caregivers, can we start that principle even now in our daily life? And this is something I wish I'd started a lot sooner in my life of everything has a purpose. Everything has a place. And I want to get your thoughts on that, John. Just I'm just throwing that out to you.

Well, there is a there's a this is bear with me for a second. There is a philosophy in in cooking and specifically in like high end kitchens called Maison Plus. Maison Plus. It's French.

I don't do French. I have a really weird relationship with that. But it is the same kind of concept. Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's M-I-S-E space E-N space P-L-A-C-E. Maison Plus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It means putting in place or everything in its place. And if you're doing these high end meals for people and you have to serve so many people so quickly that if you don't have the knife in the same place every time or you don't have the cutting board, it's like everybody has their spot and everybody knows where everything goes. And you don't you don't just set something down. You set it down exactly where it goes. Whatever that happens to be.

You just have to have a deliberate philosophy about how things are and be consistent about it. Like I used to lose my keys a lot. I know. Well, I don't. I haven't I haven't lost my keys in probably 10 years at this point.

Let me put it a different way. Not lose, but like had to look for them before I left the house. Because there's a hook in my kitchen where I put the keys. And if I walk past that hook and I'm at home and there are no keys there, I immediately drop whatever I'm doing, find the keys and put them there. If I'm walking around my house and I find my keys in my pocket and they're not on the hook, I immediately stop what I'm doing and just go and put them on the hook and they are always there. And that's just it's become so much of a habit that I never, you know, it's so rare.

I'm going to have to do that. Yeah. Because Gracie and I have had more conversations because she puts everything back where it belongs, you know, and it's all, you know, in the same place every time. And me, I'm just kind of come in and I've just dump it on the, you know, in the little valet. Yeah.

You're saying this is, you're in this tiny home now. So having a, yeah, yeah, you can't do it. There's, there's not, there's just not a lot of place for, you know, there is an advantage to that.

And, you know, unless it gets completely cluttered and really, you know, like terrible levels of whatever that, you know, there's just not that many places for the keys to be. Well, we had to go to the process the other day and we had to leave at five. We were trying to leave at five o'clock in the morning. And cause it's all the way over to Billings.

Well, that's 200 miles. We had nine o'clock appointment and, and 10 minutes of that was eaten up by me finding my keys. Oh, it is so frustrating. Well, the part of it is I'm always pushing Gracie cause she's always tardy. Gracie moves like a herd of turtles and she does it. She's not fast, but she's very organized, but she's just not fast. And so there she is looking at me with that eyebrow raised and, you know, waiting on me to find my keys.

You know, here's the double amputee woman already in the car, you know, and everything else that she has to deal with it. And so it really was very frustrating, but I'm learning to put things back where they belong, everything that's in my life. I need to get rid of the clutter. Well, as caregivers, we have so much clutter in our life because of somebody else's stuff. We got to have it all around that in itself. And then there's that emotional clutter. You know, everything has a purpose. Everything has a place. What is the place for the emotional clutter? And, and, and I think that's something that I've been struggling with a lot myself. I mean, I make no secret about this show. I do not come on here to lecture anybody about how to do it right. I come on here to affirm to you on how to do it wrong because I have so much experience of this. But I'm learning these things.

This is an affirmation. This is I'm learning these things and I want to pass it on because nobody was there to teach me these things about caregiving. They taught me other life.

I've had wonderful teachers, but I have not had there was no caregiver mentor for me. And that's a that is something that I what we talked about a little bit before the show, some one of the big meta because there's there are lots of skills out there. You know, there are excellent like carpenters.

There are excellent musicians. And that is, you know, they they're they have they're very, very good at skill. But there is a meta skill out there that I feel gets gets overlooked. And that is the ability to generalize a lesson and take what you have learned in one one discipline of your life and then move it to something else. And we were talking about teachers earlier. And my grandfather was definitely one of my teachers. And one of the things that he really was into was woodworking and working in the shop and everything like that. And again, if you put a tool back in the wrong spot, you were going to hear about it.

So that really carried over into me not losing my keys anymore because I hear him in the back of my head. Why is that there? You set it down. You're not using it anymore.

It goes back up on the on the pegboard. You know, let's let's go. So well, try it.

And who wants to go to a surgeon that does that? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, no kidding.

Hey, this is Hope for the caregiver. Eight seven seven six five five sixty seven fifty five eight seven seven six five five sixty seven fifty five. This is Peter Rosenberger. John Butler is with me. Don't lose your keys. Don't don't lose your cookies.

We'll be right back. Hey, this is Peter Rosenberger. Have you ever helped somebody walk for the first time? I've had that privilege many times through our organization Standing with Hope when my wife, Gracie, gave up both of her legs following this horrible wreck that she had as a teenager. And she tried to save them for years.

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