— October 2009 – Updated March 2010 – Updated November 2013 – Updated March 2019 —
As Our Parents Age is my effort to record the experiences of loving and support aging parents, but it is also a vehicle to help my husband and me understand and learn more about aging parent caregiving and medical care. I highlight interesting issues, identify high quality web resources, and share memories. Other posts are on topics that my husband and I would have liked to know more about at the beginning of our foray into the adult child – aging parent phase of life. Ultimately much of what I write about will help me as I grow older in retirement years.
I am not selling anything to my readers. I have no financial interest in goods or services for aging parents or their adult children, and my blog at this time has no advertising. On occasion I have provided technology support for senior citizens, sometimes receiving a small stipend, however, I am not promoting my technology skills.
Sunflowers keep me optimistic.
As a long-time educator I enjoy writing and re-writing, and I am good at research. I have taught just about every age from preschool to elderly senior adult — altogether more than 30 years of teaching experience — and have earned undergraduate and graduate degrees. I am not a professional in the field of aging or geriatrics.
In 2012, I began adding a few personal experiences to this blog — experiences that concern my aging or my family’s history.
We never stop learning. As a teacher my inclination was always to encourage people to learn more. In this case, the more we all learn about the aging parent caregiving period of our lives, the more we help family members (and ourselves) move gracefully through the aging process. Along the way, we can also become effective advocates. Perhaps in the process we can even dispel a few of our own fears about getting older.
I hope this blog will pay tribute to the amazing people in our families, individuals who are experiencing the later years of their lives. The aging process makes them no less amazing.
N.B. I recently began work on another blog — Media! Tech! Parenting! — which focuses on my long experience and professional work in the educational technology field, and it shares many observations and ideas gleaned from working with digitally native children and helping their parents think about how their connected-world parenting strategies can help change in the digital world.
Mother’s Day Tea, May 2010
January 2010 – Books and Article Reviews
And there are so many books to read and review and articles to share. When I began this blog in October 2009 I was especially focused on books about the brain, because I am a teacher, and also because one of our parents suffers from dementia.
March 2010
Our parent with dementia died early in 2010, and many of the experiences related to end-of-life are recorded here.
March 2019
Those of you who actually follow this blog will notice that I’ve been away from blog writing for just over a year. During this time my parents needed me more than my blog did. It was hard to be away, and but it’s great to be back!
June 2020
My mom died in June. She did not have CoVid-19. At age 93 she had lived a good long life filled with people and activities that she loved. She had memory challenges but functioned very well in her day-to-day activities in my parents’ assisted living community. She was Dad’s anchor because his memory disability is far more significant. Dad, age 97, is still living.
As Our Parents Age So Do We 