Renew Your Spirit This Year With Help From Respite Care
As much as you enjoy spending time with your senior loved one, giving yourself a break can often help you enjoy it that much more. When our favorite seniors age, and often decline physically and mentally, we want to be there. We spend much of our time caring for them, worrying about them and ensuring they are taken care of. We spend time soaking them in for fear we won’t have them for much longer. But often in the process, we neglect ourselves. We push the things we enjoy or need to do to the back burner, so that we can care for our seniors instead. We almost lose a sense of who we are, and instead our identity becomes caregiver to our loved one. While we wouldn’t want it any other way, there needs to be some balance. Caregivers need time for themselves to maintain a sense of normalcy, and also some time to enjoy the things they love. Having a trained, professional respite care worker come into the home to give a break on the caregiving journey can help with that. Taking some time away can lead to a renewed spirit, as well as a renewed commitment to caring for our senior loved ones in the best way possible.
What is Respite Care?
Respite Care is short-term relief for primary caregivers. With respite care, a trained professional caregiver comes into your senior loved one’s home to help with many things, from companionship to personal care. The respite care worker meets their needs and cares for your senior loved one as you do, in a professional and compassionate way. Many home care agencies, including Visiting Angels Santa Clarita, offer respite care for families of seniors. In addition to caring for a senior’s everyday needs, respite care workers also often are trained in specialty care, including dementia care, fall prevention and more, so that your senior has the skilled worker they need while you are away.
Respite Care can last for as long as you need. It can be for an hour once a day so you can take a relaxing walk along the beach, it can be for one night a week so you can head out to restaurants in Santa Clarita for dinner, or it can even be for one weekend away. You don’t even need to leave your home to use respite care. You can have a respite care worker in the home while you take an hour in the basement to do yoga. They can be there while you take a nap. Or they can even be there for companionship while you make phone calls, work or cook dinner. However you choose to use respite care, it is meant as a break for the primary caregiver.
How Respite Care Can Renew Your Spirit
Taking a break from things, even those things we love the most, often can help us cherish them even more. If you spend all of your time with your senior loved one, and stop doing the other things you used to love, resentment can build. Taking some time to do what you love, like grabbing a coffee with a friend or walking along the beach, can make you feel like you again. It can refresh you, and send you back to your senior loved one with a renewed spirit. It also might give your senior some much-needed time away from you. Spending some time away can also help you both realize what is important, and how much you cherish each other, so that when you return you are more grateful, tolerant and patient. Being away also allows us to reflect on our relationships with our seniors, and what we are doing right and what we can do better. Using respite care can trigger a renewed commitment to providing the best care possible for our senior loved ones.
Visiting Angels Can Help
If you are looking for respite care to help with a senior loved one, our professionals at Visiting Angels Santa Clarita are here for you. We provide a variety of home care services, including fall prevention services, companion care, a safe and steady program, and in-home care for help with daily life activities. Whatever needs your senior loved one has, our trained professionals can help. We can help make the holidays easier for both you and your senior loved one.
Our expert team of caregivers serves clients in Santa Clarita and Antelope Valley. To learn more about our services, call us at 661-263-2273, or fill out an online form here.