Routines

I recycle the Lipton Diet Green Tea bottles. I am using half Ocean Spray diet cranberry juice and half tea. Cranberry juice helps prevent UTIs. My husband loves this drink and I tell him that along with regular showers (two minimum per week) and cranberry juice helps.

Before he got over this UTI infection, I thought that both shaving and showering would be a problem. I bought a $4 estate sale shower chair shown at the right. I put it in the shower, but hubby wanted nothing to do with something that makes him feel old and he really has bounced back and gotten his strength back.

In fact, I can't tell that this UTI infection made him go into a further stage of Alzheimer's. He is the same fun self and I love spending time with him. He likes to go on errands with me. He lives in the now like I should. Buying that shower chair was premature.

What is not premature, is working on good routines. Even though there is a check list on his clipboard, he doesn't always abide by it. I read we caregivers need to reinforce good routines early on and we will be thankful we did later on. I am continuiing to enforce shaving every other day and regular showers. The routine of taking pills is not easy. He doesn't like to take them. Thankfully I have neighbor Kenny to get him to take his pills when I leave the house in the morning. Sunday night I went to bed, before I saw him take his pills, and I found them in a napkin Monday morning.

I have been so impressed with how Davina is taking care of her mother-in-law. I asked her about showering and she gave me these pictures of the shower put into the mother-in-law's house with a seat and grab bars.
.

In addition to grab bars, they have the portable shower head.

Caring.com here and Carole Larkin here on the Alzheimer's Reading Room offer tips on bathing and showering our loved ones with Alzheimer's. So far hubby is able to do all of this for himself. He doesn't want anything that looks like this product either.

So for the time being, shaving and showering is not the problem I thought it would be while DH was recovering from the UTI and he seems like his old self, still fiesty about taking pills, but seemingly in the same state of normal as before his hospitalizations and infection. He just asked me, when are we going to bed? I told him when he took his pills, and he took his pills!, although earlier in the evening he had complained about those pills.

Thank you, LORD! Help me to navigate

this caregiving with insight.