Memory Book

Mom always liked reminiscing about things she remembered from years ago, especially her parents, sisters and the house my sister and I grew up in.

Like most Alzheimer’s patients, mom’s long term memory was pretty good while her short term memory was very bad.  But sometimes even the people, places and events from long ago would get mixed up. 

One day, while looking at online photo printing services, I saw that one of the products they offered was a photo book.  What a great idea.  I could get some photos together and make mom what I called a Memory Book.

I went through all our family photo’s and picked out some of her parents, her sisters, dad, their wedding day, relatives that we saw all the time, our old house, pets, etc. and put them all together in the book and labeled them so she could always read who and what they were even if she couldn’t remember.  I even put them in chronological order as a guide to when things happened even though I wasn’t sure she’d notice.  I thought maybe on some level that would help. 

The book was a hit.  When mom asked about someone or something that was in the book, I could bring it out and we’d look through it.  It never failed to bring a smile to her face.  Being able to see the photo’s really helped her memory too.  When she saw the photo's she remembered names of people that I had forgotten.

Of course, when she put the book away in a drawer, she’d forget about it.  Out of sight, out of mind.  But I was always able to find it pretty quick.  We were able to spend a lot of time looking through that book together.

--I made and purchased my book (typically called photobooks on the websites) through Shutterfly.com.  The quality was very good.  Now that mom’s gone, that book means a lot to me.  There are several other online photo printing services that have something very similar such as:  KodakGallery.com, Photoworks.com and Snapfish.com.

Technorati Tags: Reminisce, photo book, memory book, photos, photography

Comments

[Karma]

I love this idea. I'm going to link to it on my blog to remind myself to do this when I get to Kansas City.