as with the body, so settles the mind

My sister and I have ongoing conversations [vents] regarding my mother. She'll phone us - each of us - in near panics over pretty much everything. And I suspect that she thinks ill of us for not appreciating the magnitude of each and every crisis and particularly for suggesting that, perhaps, things aren't necessarily as big a deal as one might work it up to be.

My dad, however, has always been the more rational one. I was going to say stable, but that would be misleading: he can be incredibly stubborn and has been known to have a short fuse, though never without reason. But he has generally been the sanity off of which my mother ricochets. But even that's changing.

But they are, as parents are wont to do, both getting older. And weirder. They're feeding a gaggle of wild animals in the town limits. One of them [there is debate as to which one] got the Magpie a Raggedy Ann doll with American flags on her dress [nothing wrong with that and she's beautiful and the Magpie loves her...just why??] and each and every little quirk that they have is getting more and more ingrained and exaggerated. Everything is a slightly bigger crisis for my mother and, to my dad, everything is a little more black and white.

Are they getting set in their ways? Is this settling into retirement? Is this digging into a rut? Or is it some sort of giving in or giving up? And what are my sister and I supposed to do with our increasing need to discuss the parents with each other?