We, Your people

and the sheep of Your pasture,

Will give thanks to You forever;

To all generations we will tell of Your praise.

Psalm 79:13

As a Sandwich Generation Grandmother, this is one of my favorite verses.

It reminds me to encourage

my kids, my grandkids,

my great-grandkids (well, not yet, but someday )

in God’s love.

And it’s also perfect for a Word-Filled Wednesday that’s only a week

before Thanksgiving. Joining you in giving thanks to God FOREVER!

For more inspirational Bible Verses and photos to encourage your heart, visit Forever His.

Have a blessed week!

Thanksgiving is Thursday, followed by Black Friday. Fun times for all on both days   After that, come two of my very favorite celebrations, Advent and Christmas. As a matter of fact, the first Sunday of Advent is this coming Sunday, November 29.  If you haven’t already done so, I would encourage you to purchase at least five candles – four red and one white. Even if you only see your grandkids once or twice through the season they, along with your senior parents, will enjoy an Advent wreath so much. It can also be a blessing to do your own personal devotions using them, whether just on Sundays or every night. And if you get the grandkids more often, this is such a grand way of teaching them about the true meaning of Christmas.

Starting next week, SandwichINK is joining in with Troc, Brock, and Recup by featuring a four week series of Advent ideas for Sandwich Generation Senior Care Givers and Grandparents. You’ll find Advent ideas here as well as at several other sites that will be a part of this fun series, giving you a great way to get in the mood and discover plenty of fun, interesting, and new ideas for celebrating the Advent and Christmas season with your multi-generational family.

The participants of this Advent series are from countries all around the world and are all ages including other Sandwich Generation-ers. I’m looking forward to learning new ways to prepare for Christmas from all over the world, as well as sharing some of my favorites as well. Join us, won’t you, as we have fun preparing our hearts for Advent, while teaching our grandkids the joy of doing the same.

Tips to Keep the Stress Out of Thanksgiving Dinner

Thanksgiving is almost here and it would be easy for all of us Sandwich Generation senior home care givers to start getting stressed and anxious. Too many of us feel that everything has to be done, and done perfectly, when the reality is, that simpler is easier and less stressful for all. The most important part of the holidays really should be connecting with each other. Here are a few simple tips to have a more enjoyable Thanksgiving dinner and visit with friends and family.

Plan Ahead

While planning the Thanksgiving meal, do you plan who is going to help?  Instead of doing it all yourself, ask friends and family to help.  This is especially important for senior home care givers. I don’t know about you, but in my season of life, I can’t guarantee anything for sure.   So I always plan backups of backups. Asking others to help is one of the easiest ways to accomplish that.  Make a list of what needs done before everyone arrives.  Give everyone something to do and assign things that are age appropriate to the children.  Even plan the after-dinner cleanup and leftover divisions. Before you know it, the leftovers will be wrapped in foil and everyone will have had a great time.

Covered Dish Meal

If you are having or attending a large group get-together for Thanksgiving, divide the menu between all who are attending. The host family can provide the main dish (turkey or ham) and the drinks. Each of the other families can bring a favorite side dish and dessert. If you want to make sure there is a variety, provide a menu and mark things off as people choose what they want to fix.  I’ve done this successfully with both Bible study pot lucks and family get-togethers. This year, I am bringing a yummy pumpkin pie and my specialty salad.

Simplify

As I said before, simplifying is good. Instead of having a huge feast, prepare a smaller meal.  We all tend to overeat at Thanksgiving, so make an effort to make fewer dishes.  Not only will the preparation be smaller, so will our waistlines.  Our family rarely makes stuffing anymore. We all love it, but it is fattening and with all the other goodies, we never miss it.

Another option is to prepare as much ahead of time as you can. Slow cookers can be used to make all kinds of foods, even desserts.  Many things can also be made as “freezer meals” and stored for weeks before re-heating them.  The less actual cooking you need to do on Thanksgiving, the lower your stress levels will be.

Be Thankful

Simply taking the time to be thankful for all our blessings can reduce our stress levels.  I like to make place cards for each person with Bible verses of thanksgiving. I also love the custom where everyone shares 1-3 things they are thankful for, either before or after dinner.

Stop and Smell the Roses

Do you love flowers as much as I do? And have you ever noticed that when you take a moment to stop and smell them, it seems to help relax you. You might want to add some Thanksgiving Flowers to your plan.  In fact, add holiday flowers to your list BEFORE the holiday and stop and enjoy them for a second or two throughout the preparation process.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Following your plan, including stopping to smell the Thanksgiving flowers, means you really can enjoy a more peaceful and happy Thanksgiving even in the midst of senior home care giving!

The holidays are coming closer and I suspect there’s a wide mixture over how various Sandwich Generation senior home care givers are feeling about it. Some of us are looking forward to it with total glee. Others are in the place I was the year my dad passed away. Our joy and anticipation in the season is tempered by sadness in dealing with our aging parent’s declining health.

I remember going to a Thanksgiving church service and being blessed by the joyful songs and the adorable children’s choir, then going home straight into a new crisis resulting in a trip to the emergency room. We never made it to the church’s Christmas programs which are often one of my favorite holiday traditions. The Hospice program helped so much, and also kept me so busy during that time period. There are many sad memories, but also many blessed ones, like how the kids helped out so wonderfully during the difficult situations, and how his great-grandkids could bring a smile to my dad’s face that little else could do. I especially loved how sweet my parents continued to be with each other during this hard time. It was definitely not our normal holiday season, but it was a blessed season of life!

Other senior home care givers are dealing with aging parents struggling with long-term chronic illnesses such as cancer. Last year, at the end of the holiday season, I read an interesting article by Melanie Haiken, from Caring’s website, How to Celebrate the New Year — with Cancer. It was such a good article, I put it on my calendar to be sure I shared it with you during this holiday season, well before New Year’s! Even though her focus is on cancer, I suspect that much of it is true for most of our aging parents with any kind of debilitating illness. Of course, you always want to check with your own doctor to be sure, but this article should give you some great questions next time you take your aging parents to the doctor’s office. If you aren’t going before the holidays, you could give your advice nurse a call and check with them.

After reading this article of how much our aging parents can probably do during the holiday season, I was greatly encouraged and I hope you will be too.

What about you? Do you have any tips to share with us on how to combine senior home care giving and the holiday season? We’d love to hear them. And be sure to sign up for the SandwichINK free email with plenty of resources to inform and encourage you during the holidays and beyond.

Senior Home Care Giving:

Caregiver Tips: Activities for aging parents with Alzheimer’s Disease. @carebuzz

Strategies for the Sandwich Generation Senior Home Care Giver at BusinessWeek.

Alzheimers Update: Insurance Company Requires Proof for Every Aricept Prescription. RT @alzheimersdotfm

Interesting article about Sandwich Generation Senior Home Care Givers at CBN News.

Interesting info at the November 4th EldercareABC Blog Carnival including heating cost help for senior citizens!

Help Your Favorite Senior Fight Alzheimer’s This Thanksgiving: Win a $2,500 Brain Fitness System.

Thanks to new technologies taking care of the elderly will become much easier in the future.   @caring4parents

Adding a Stair Lift to Aid a Senior Loved One.

Grandparenting:

CurrClick is offering a free Thanksgiving workbook. CurrClick is a good resource for homeschooling programs as well as having lots of fun ideas for grandkids & grandparents.

Baby Boomer Generation:

Statistics show that more and more of the Baby Boomer Generation are online, including surfing such places as Facebook. It’s vital to remember to be careful what information you share with others!  Your date of birth and birthplace are enough info to give an identity thief a 44% chance of getting the first five digits of your social security number!

YUMMY – a beloved elderly neighbor gave me this recipe years ago and I was so sad that I had lost it. One of my daughters just spotted it online! It is SOOOO good!

That’s it for this Twitter Tuesday. Have a great week and don’t forget to sign up for our free SandwichINK email.

Thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas are my three favorite holidays, although I do enjoy all the holidays. With Thanksgiving getting closer and Advent right on its heels, it’s definitely time to start thinking about Advent calendars to share with our grandkids, as part of their homeschooling programs or just for fun, along with other interesting ways to celebrate the season with them. Of course, one of the first places I plan to start is with SandwichINK’s own Grandparents: Advent Fun from last year. Then it’ll be time to find new ideas from various other sites.

As you can imagine, I was quite excited this morning to open my email and discover a cute article from TipJunkie. She has several fun Advent calendars we can enjoy making with our grandkids.

From there I went on to my favorite Advent Calendar site yet – an online Advent Calendar! It’s all set up for December 1 – 25. When you click on a date, you find a Bible reading, activity, craft, recipe, delightful Christmas hymn, and fun Christmas song.  From the Legend of the Candy Cane to a cute Gingerbread House and lots more, there’s plenty to keep grandkids and grandparents busy throughout the month of December, while keeping the primary focus on the fact that Jesus is the Reason for the Season.

How about you? What are your favorite Advent calendars? Also, don’t forget to sign up for the FREE SandwichINK email to stay on top of all the new holiday ideas, resources, and projects coming your way this season and throughout the year.

Tis the season to start ramping up the holiday fun – both with local grandkids and long distance grandchildren. One grandchild and I spent a delightful hour in Big Lots enjoying the Harvest and Halloween decor aisle. We left with a tiny scarecrow for the mantel, a bigger scarecrow for great-grandma’s room, and a cute metal decoration for the front door – three pumpkins and the inscription, “Bless This House.” Thanks to Big Lots’ prices it didn’t cost much and we had a terrific time picking just the right items!

Christmas and Thanksgiving decor were there as well, but we ran out of time to investigate those. We’ll have fun with them later. Picking out and displaying holiday decorations have always been some of my favorite traditions. Would you believe I have a full-sized scarecrow that is over ten years old! We used to put him in a chair right outside the front door to greet visitors to our door. Now he’s in the house as my grandkids absolutely dote on him! They dance with him, hug him, use him as a pillow to watch TV and just have the best time with him! The memories from this particular tradition are priceless and will be just as special 20 years from now!

My long distance grandkids also love Autumn and Autumn decor. They are wonderful at sending me Harvest pictures to help decorate the house! Those are always a special treat! 

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some fun and free (one of my favorite ways to save money ) craft ideas for the holiday season – from Autumn and Thanksgiving to Christmas and New Years. Keep checking back for more fun ideas and also we’d love to hear your suggestions as well!

For more Family Friday articles, be sure to visit Home Ever After, where they have a great article about lunch notes for our grandkids!

Thanksgiving and Christmas and the days in between are often full of family get-togethers, reunions, and holiday parties. They are fun occasions full of laughter, joy, and sometimes even a bit of stress.  Our extended-family reunion was always a highlight of the year for me, until we moved too far away to attend. Now I enjoy emails and the occasional visit to aunts, uncles and cousins. If you are blessed to be getting together with older relatives, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc., I would like to suggest adding a new dimension to your gatherings this year.

Ask them to share their family history with you. If you’ve already got the family tree all written out, congratulations. I suspect that you are a smart family who is in the minority. Too many of us tend to focus on the here and now, especially at family gatherings when there is so much going on. We’re so busy asking how the past year went, but those are also excellent times to fill in the blanks of family relationships and histories further back in time. Why bother, you may ask? Medical reasons! You may all be doing fine and healthy, but maybe next year someone will develop an odd condition that needs figuring out. Or perhaps a new grandchild will appear down the road, with an unusual medical condition. Trust me, it’s happening a lot nowadays!

Knowing your family history going back several generations can tell you what country your family migrated from. Knowing the last names can help as well. In doing genetic research to narrow down diseases, that information can be vital. I am blessed to have a wonderful set of aunts on both sides of my family who took the time to make copies of old Bibles with births and deaths listed, along with writing down family trees. I even have little autobiographies written by several of my older relatives, three generations back. Even so, I wish now that I had talked to a couple of those relatives while they were still with us and gotten even more information.

Hindsight is always 100%, but you have the benefit of reading this article! So as you are visiting with all your relatives, passing plates of turkey and cranberries, smiling over cups of hot cocoa, take the time to say to Aunt Maude or Grandpa Hezekiah, “Tell me about our family. How far back can you remember of your parents, grandparents, cousins, etc.” While you’re at it, I would ask them what life was like when they were growing up. Reading the autobiographies of my family recently was definitely fascinating! Ask, also, if they know of any illnesses, diseases, etc. that any family member had. This might be a bit more difficult to acquire as some older adults may consider that too personal. Most enjoy sharing what they know, however, and overall, I suspect that your older relatives will thoroughly enjoy sharing this information with you. This might even be the best and most interesting get-together in years.

If you don’t do it at the party, make sure when you get home, to write all the information down. It’s amazing how quickly we can forget. Save this information, along with other pertinent relationships as you learn of them. Type them up and distribute a copy to each of your children and other relatives it impacts. Make sure to have a computer copy and a printed out copy. A dear friend of mine worked on a family history for me years ago as a gift, but never completed it. Much of her work was in her older computer, but technology has marched along and it is now inaccessible. Sometimes the old-fashioned ways of paper and ink are best.

Have a wonderful time at all those family reunions, enjoying each others company and learning more about yourselves and your families, for posterities sake. If you have any other ideas or suggestions on this, please leave a comment below or send an email to Kaye@SandwichINK.com . We would LOVE to hear from you!!!

Black Friday. I mentioned it in my post on November 22, http://www.sandwichink.com/caregivers-shopping-tools , but then realized you might not know what I was talking about. Black Friday is the name given by stores and extreme shoppers to the Friday after Thanksgiving’s mega-deal shopping madness and fun. Supposedly stores hope to move their accounting figures out of the red column into the profitable black column. I have several close to me who love going out way before the crack of dawn to shop for the absolute best deals ever. It is as much a sporting event as a shopping trip and they look forward to it for months in advance. Me? I enjoy staying home and babysitting. Warmer, cuddlier, and way less dangerous! Have you seen how vicious some of those shoppers can get!

On the other hand, I do enjoy going out later in the afternoon for some sweet deals. Not as sweet as they got earlier, but still not bad. And if I can do it online I’m even happier. Anything that saves us caregivers time as well as money is wonderful!

Whether you prefer my route or the extreme shopping adventure, I’ve got some great info to share with you.

Here are three Black Friday-specific websites with early info to whet your appetite:

http://www.blackfriday.info/ and http://www.blackfriday.info/online/

http://bfads.net/

http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com/

Also, the Lean Green Family website has a great article on some basics for Black Friday plus some updated info on Cyber Monday  – http://suddenlyfrugal.blogspot.com/2008/11/4-ways-to-make-most-of-black.html . Cyber Monday is the Monday after Black Friday when a lot of computer and tech items go on sale. But according to both BlackFriday.info and Lean Green Family, those items might actually be on sale as early as Friday and if you are thinking of ordering online, they might even be throwing in free shipping. So if you are thinking of any tech purchases for gifts or for yourself, this is the week to really watch the newspaper and check the sites you are most interested in. And keep an eye on the above sites as well!

One of the traditions I have enjoyed doing on those years when Thanksgiving is hosted at my home is making place cards. Not just any place cards, mind you. I have fun combining cute pictures and Bible verses to make place cards that help set a mood of holiday fun and joyful thanksgiving right from the beginning of the meal. I thought it would be fun to share a couple with you. The font is Comic Sans to make it easy for the younger grandkids to read and in a large print to make it easy for the elderly relatives to read. You will probably need to copy this page and paste it into a word processor like Word. It should then be the right size. If not, you will need to select the font and change the size to one you like. It worked well with my software. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you. If it doesn’t work right, let me know that as well, and I’ll email you a word document with the place cards in the larger print. Happy Thanksgiving! 

Happy Thanksgiving

______________________

O give thanks to the LORD, for He is good; For His lovingkindness is everlasting.

Happy Thanksgiving

______________________

O give thanks to the LORD, for He is good; For His lovingkindness is everlasting.

Thank you to Free Thanksgiving Vintage Postcards – http://hubpages.com/hub/Thanksgiving-vintage-postcards – for freely sharing their adorable graphics including the two pictures above.

Thank you, also, to Frugal Upstate, for their Frugal Thanksgiving Mini Series. Today’s topic is Family Traditions which you can find at http://frugalupstate.blogspot.com/2008/11/best-thanksgiving-traditions-frugal_20.html .