What do you mean you can't be ready in an hour?

I have decided that I am going to examine just what is involved in getting a care recipient ready to go somewhere. Given the response from my siblings on why we don't go places more often, and why we want more than an hour's warning on when they want to get us and go somewhere, I have a suspicion that there are others out there that have similar problems.

It seems to be easy for friends and family to make arrangements for things to do, so easy that they get irritable when the caregiver says that there is no way they can be ready and do the activity in that timeframe. So, I will start looking at what it takes to get ready - and mind you my dad is not as difficult to get ready as a lot of other care recipients, while there will be some that will match this timeframe, there will be care recipients that will require less time and some who will require significantly longer to get ready.

I hope that this will at least give a basic idea on what it would take, on an average scale, for a caregiver to get everything ready when they want to go somewhere with their care recipient.

AARP 2006 press release: Who's Caring for the Caregivers?

This is a link to an AARP press release on 'Who's Caring for the Caregivers?' that I want to be able to find my way back to later. Published a little over a year ago (March 16, 2006) I want to take a closer look at the programs that they discuss and see what the current situation for those programs are and if anything has possibly been added to the list since the press release was issued.

Caregiver articles from the February 1997 issue of Awake!

I was meandering the Internet again (I do that a lot) looking for information that might be of interest to caregivers, and I came across a series of articles on caregiving on the Watchtower website for Jehovah's Witnesses. The series of articles appeared in the February 8, 1997 issue of Awake! and are:

The Challenge of Caregiving
How to Deal With Feelings
Caring for the Caregiver—How Others Can Help

Even if you are not a Jehovah's Witness, the articles are worth reading over for insight into what being a caregiver is like and maybe learning how you can help a caregiver you know.