My 94 yr old mom has been in A.L. for 4 weeks. She is beginning to lament over how her life used to be, and how she has no life of her own in A.L. She misses cooking, grocery shopping, just the freedoms we take for granted in our daily lives. She has earlier stages of dementia. If I brought mother to my home (30 miles away) for a day, maybe do some cooking, have a meal, play with kitties, would that be a good or bad idea?
Mother now lives in a very nice AL with loving caretakers, just 6 minutes from our home. The director says that when we aren't there she is happy, eats well, always smiling and visits and loves on everybody. She has her routine, walking 10 miles a day with her rolator. We hear directly from residents how much they just love her. Her quality of life is amplified partly because we don't visit but maybe once every 10 days to 2 weeks. This may sound awful, but mother's life there needs to be as happy and full as possible. She's been there for 3 1/2 months so her acclamation to her new home is still happening.
Said all this to say, it's hard. Sounds like your mother has more memories intact which she missing her past life. Makes it hard.
My mother's long term memory is pretty well gone but she has a sustained memory of her mom & dad...always needing to go visit them or she needs to get home to take care of the kids. Short term memory is very little.
It's a contiuous journey that changes by the day. It's probably not a good idea to take your mother out. But it's your call as I don't know your mother.
Plus, with age related dementia worsening from mini strokes or something, he repeats the same stuff every time I visit, and it gets old. "How much money do I have, do I still have my car, or my motor home? Why doesn't mom visit? " Moms been dead 15 years, motor home sold 20 years ago, etc. I reassure him he has no worries about anything, but it's always the same conversation. So I decided to keep visits to once a week, sometimes twice, and to keep visits short, usually half an hour, sometimes less if he doesn't feel well.
What activities does the ALF offer? It would be so, so much better if you could get her to engage with what's there. Does she not have any opportunities at all to cook, even in a very basic, limited way? No outings to malls, or anything like that?
Four weeks is not very long, so I'm hoping these are teething troubles only and it's not the case that there is really, literally, nothing for her to enjoy doing at the facility.
She often refuses to dress, so planning to include her is awkward and not always comfortable for her, and there are no memory devices that prompt her to get up and dressed if she’s not inclined.
Although she continues to be reasonably sociable with us, her adjustment to her new arrangements did not go smoothly early on.
In our experience, adjustment took much longer than 4 weeks. After she’d been in Memory Care for about 4 months, she needed to leave briefly for an appointment with an orthopedist. She gratefully returned to her room when the appointment was over.