Alzheimer’s and
Memory Loss

Thinking About Senior Care For Your Aging Parents?

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Maybe your parents should no longer drive or have mobility issues. Maybe your Mom or Dad has dementia and needs constant monitoring. Whatever the case, baby boomers handling care for an elderly relative has become the “new normal.” In fact, more than 43.5 million Americans are caring for someone older than 50, according to the Family Caregiver Alliance. Whereas your parents used to take care of you, you may now find the roles reversed – you are now considering how to take care of them.  How could you not? They loved you and provided for you all those years so now...

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Why Seniors Want to Age in Place

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If you even mention the words “assisted living” or “nursing home” to your parents, chances are the words make them cringe.  The thought conjures up images of loneliness, being surrounded in an unfamiliar environment with people that are strangers. In fact, most seniors fear moving out of their home more than death. In fact, nearly 90 percent of seniors want to stay in their own homes as they age even if they need day-to-day assistance. In a study conducted by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) only 9% of seniors prefer to move to a facility where health care...

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It Takes a Village

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[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="231"] Molly Rowe – Owner, FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA[/caption] Guilt, I’m discovering, is a huge part of this aging thing. Our parent feels guilt for putting us out, frets about being a burden, worries about picking up the phone to ask for help. We the adult children question our decisions, second-guess our actions, and feel guilt for all we can’t do. I feel similar guilt with my preschool-aged children—worrying about their school, wondering if I’m reading enough books, stressing because they like only one vegetable. But with young children, it’s ok—even expected—to ask for help....

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Opening The Conversation on Care

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Molly Rowe owns FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA with her husband, Steve, and lives in Swampscott with their two sons. A few weeks ago, I wrote about our regrets related to my father-in-law in the last few years of his life. Since then, I’ve heard many stories from people who’ve shared similar experiences caring for an aging parent or loved one. Every story is different of course, but there’s one sentence I keep hearing over and over: “Looking back, we should have had help.” It’s mind-boggling to me, really, that we are all in this “caring for our parent”...

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Living a Purpose-Filled Life At Any Age

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Molly Rowe owns FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA with her husband, Steve, and lives in Swampscott with their two sons. [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="137"] Molly Rowe - Owner, FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA[/caption] Of all the things that baffled us about our dad’s (my dad-in-law’s) behavior in the last few years of his life, there’s one thing that stands out most of all. It wasn’t that he started freezing all his food (including his butter) or sleeping in a chair every night. It was that he stopped doing crossword puzzles. Crossword puzzles were a mainstay in his house...

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Conversations We Wish We’d Had

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Molly Rowe owns FirstLight Home Care of Salem, MA with her husband, Steve, and lives in Swampscott with their two sons. About a year ago last summer, my husband, his siblings, and I sat around our kitchen table having the conversation we’d long avoided—how to care for Dad. Like most people who end up sitting at this table, we had a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. We Googled things like home care and visiting nurses, debated how to take his driver’s license away, and fretted about how we’d bring it up to him. Little did we...

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How To Find The Right Caregiver

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A caregiver is an important companion for your parent and can support them with everything from bathing and light housekeeping, to meal preparation, prescription pick-ups and transportation to and from doctor’s appointments. If you have determined that having additional outside support to help you care for your parents, you might struggle with where to start to find an outside service and even one you can trust. Following are some important considerations to get the process started. Caregivers can be found through personal referrals, but oftentimes it is easier to go through a reliable referring service that handles the background checks...

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Baby Boomer Trends

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The Baby Boomer generation are pretty cool. There are 40 million Americans age 65 and older and they make up 13 percent of the population. By 2030, when all the baby boomers will have passed age 65, this group will represent over 20 percent of the population. What’s fascinating is that they continue to make a difference in our world. Here are some trends that show just how Baby Boomers are making an impact! 1. Helping Young People: Baby Boomers are going back to the classroom to support local schools. With funding reduced in area schools, many Boomers are joining...

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What Is Personal Care?

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We Put The "Personal" In Personalized Care Actually, every service that FirstLight Home Care provides is personalized – whether it’s dementia care, senior care, respite care, care for people with disabilities, or care for the chronically ill. That’s because each of us is unique, with our own schedules, lifestyles and needs. At FirstLight, we call our home care aides caregivers, because that’s what they do – take care of you. You may have heard them called personal care assistants, companions, or personal support workers. No matter their title, they are passionate about helping you with the Activities of Daily Living...

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Bring Light to the Holidays—How to Avoid a Blue Holiday Season

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Many people look forward to the holiday season. This is a time of year that is often associated with holiday traditions, spending time with family friends, eating delicious food, going to holiday parties and enjoying the beautiful winter weather. However, this can be a hard time of the year for seniors. They may feel nostalgic or lonely or depressed during the holiday months. As the holidays approach, they can begin to become upset about health issues, the loss of loved ones over the past year or their inability to travel to see family this year. The holiday blues can affect...

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