While Waterloo N.Y. was officially declared the origin of Memorial Day by President Lyndon Johnson in May 1966, it’s tough to confirm conclusively the source of the day. It is much more likely that it had many individual beginnings; each of those towns and every scheduled or spontaneous meeting of people to honor the war dead in the 1860′s identified the common human need to honor our dead, each added honestly to the growing movement that culminated in Gen Logan giving his formal proclamation in 1868. It is not important who was the very first, what is essential is that Memorial Day was established.

Memorial Day is not about dividing. It is about getting back together; it is about coming together to honor those who gave their all. Traditional observance of Memorial Day has diminished over the years. Many Americans these days have forgotten the significance and customs of Memorial Day. 

Since the late 50′s on the Thursday before Memorial Day, the 1,200 soldiers of the 3d U.S. Infantry place small American flags at each of the more than 260,000 gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery. They then patrol 24 hours a day during the weekend to ensure that each flag remains standing. 

In 1951, the Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts of St. Louis began placing flags on the 150,000 graves at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery as an annual Good Turn, a practice that continues to this day. More recently, beginning in 1998, on the Saturday before the observed day for Memorial Day, the Boys Scouts and Girl Scouts place a candle at each of approximately 15,300 grave sites of soldiers buried at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park on Marye’s Heights (the Luminaria Program). And in 2004, Washington D.C. held its first Memorial Day parade in over 60 years.

To help re-educate and remind Americans of the true meaning of Memorial Day, the “National Moment of Remembrance” resolution was passed on Dec 2000 which asks that at 3 p.m. local time, for all Americans “To voluntarily and informally observe in their own way a Moment of remembrance and respect, pausing from whatever they are doing for a moment of silence or listening to ‘Taps.”

The Moment of Remembrance is a step in the right direction to returning the meaning back to the day. What is needed is a full return to the original day of observance. Set aside one day out of the year for the nation to get together to remember, reflect and honor those who have given their all in service to their country.

May is Older Americans Month, a wonderful opportunity to exhibit our gratitude for the older adults in our towns.

Since 1963, towns across the nation have grouped together to celebrate Older Americans Month—a proud custom that demonstrates our nation’s loyalty to acknowledging the impact and accomplishments of mature Americans.

The topic for Older Americans Month 2012, “Never Too Old to Play…”
inspires older Americans to continue to be involved, active and involved in their own lives and in their communities.

Here are some creative ideas for Older American’s Month

Brain Activities

Older adults may experience multiple changes in the structure and activity of the brain that can affect how we move and think. But developing studies show that specific actions can teach and spark the brain, bettering its efficiency and potentially even decreasing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. While we do not know which specific daily activities may be of benefit, the ones mentioned below are fun ways to engage your brain.

Consider offering some of these events for Older Americans Month:

- Trivia competition. You’re never too old to play trivia! It’s a great way to bring together older adults and their younger friends and neighbors for a couple of hours of fun and discovery. As a featured activity for Older Americans Month 2012, AoA has developed a team trivia game for your Day of Play. Players will exercise their minds in a 90-minute competition, where intergenerational groups of four to six people gather to answer trivia questions about culture, major events, and sports.

-Crossword puzzles. Crossword puzzles are excellent mental exercises. In the spirit of Older Americans Month, AoA has developed a series of crossword puzzles that you can print and distribute to Day of Play participants.

-Traditional games. Games like Scrabble, bridge, and pokeno are timeless classics and have the potential to be fun intergenerational games. Hold a game night and invite participants to form teams to play these traditional games. Provide a venue, a few decks of cards, a handful of board games, and let the good times roll!

-Continuing education/speaker series. Talk to the older adults you work with and find out what topics interest them. A speaker series as part of your Day of Play might include local professors, authors or others expert in their fields giving presentations on the topics of greatest interest.
To learn more about brain health, please visit:

National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging Memory/Cognitive Health

Alzheimer’s Association: Brain Health

Take care of the seniors in your life and celebrate National Older American’s Month.

To honor the dedication, commitment, and tireless commitment of the nearly 3.1 million registered nurses nationally to increase and care for the health and wellbeing of the US, the American Nurses Association is elated to acknowledge registered nurses in all places on this selected day for the caregiving and top quality work they provide seven days a week, 365 days a year.

In tribute to Nursing: Advocating, Leading, Caring, all registered nurses in America are encouraged to proudly wear the official ANA “RN” pin or any other pin that plainly recognizes them as registered nurses, and/or their nurses uniform on May 6, 2012.

Nurses: Advocating, Leading, Caring 

Often identified as an art and a science, nursing is a job that embraces committed individuals with distinct pursuits, skills and loves because of the many choices the profession has. Nurses are caregivers, work in emergency rooms, school based clinics, and homeless shelters, among others. They have many assignments – from staff nurse to educator to nurse practitioner and nurse researcher – and perform all of them with excitement for the industry and with a strong commitment to patient safety.

National Nurses Week History    

National Nurses Week starts off yearly on May 6th and ends on May 12th, Florence Nightingale’s birthday. 

These solid dates improve planning and positions National Nurses Week as an organized recognition event. As of 1998, May 8 was designated as National Student Nurses Day, to be recognized each year. And as of 2003, National School Nurse Day is celebrated on the Wednesday within National Nurses Week (May 6-12) each year.

The nursing business has been backed and publicized by the American Nurses Association (ANA) since 1896. 

Each of ANA’s state and territorial nurses associations promotes the nursing profession at the state and regional levels. Each conducts celebrations on these dates to recognize the contributions that nurses and nursing make to the community.

If you know a registered nurse, be sure to thank him or her for their service during National Nurses Week 2012.

Plant a Row for the Hungry at a Local Community Garden

In this land of great quantity it’s hard to envision being without access to good food at a cheap charge. Nevertheless, for millions of Americans, acquiring a healthy meal is not always very easy. It’s approximated almost 33 million people, including 13 million children, try to use emergency food because they cannot manage to pay for the food they need.

Host a Plant Swap at a Neighborhood Church

The finest plants aren’t always from your nearby garden center or seed catalog. Rather they are assembled through quick cuttings or by getting seeds from the garden of a friend or family member. These “pass-along plants” supply both splendor and affection to your garden.

Have a Spring Cleaning Green Up Day at a Senior’s Home

Spring cleaning — indoors and out — is a ritual that marks the end of winter and the start of a brand-new season, and similar to many functions, it’s more fun when you share it. A senior’s home, your street, neighborhood, town park, and any other public space could use some greening up; it just takes someone to organize a small group.

Yard Sale Philanthropy

The emergence of spring, accompanied by a bit longer days and higher temperatures, gives you dreams of green oases teeming with tomatoes and brimming with beans. Spring is also a time for cleaning out. This year, celebrate National Garden Month in an unexpected way-by visiting yard sales in search of second-hand stuff that every senior’s garden needs.

Organize a Garden Visit with Senior Friends, Over Tea!

Gardeners grow more than plants – every one of us has stories to share. For a change, why not share them in over tea? Socialization and admiration of another person’s garden brings joy to everyone.

Other options for celebrating with seniors in your group:

-Organize or get involved in a town beautification day.

-Visit your community farmers’ market.

-Flatter a neighbor on his or her garden.

-Get together with neighbors to purchase compost and mulch in bulk quantities.

-Volunteer to plant and maintain a garden at your town library.

-Present a gardening article or essay to your neighborhood newspaper.

-Arrange to Talk With an elder to learn what foods his or her family grew when he or she was a child.

-Search for neighbors from differentethnic groups to study about their native cuisine and gardening techniques.

-Green up your street or a local park by picking up trash.

-Share a cutting of one of your favorite landscape or houseplants with a senior neighbor.

-Inventory your gardening gear (e.g., pots, seeds, stakes) and offer the excess to a local community gardening program, assisted living facility or school garden.

-Celebrate other important “green” holidays: Earth Day (April 22) and National Arbor Day (April 26).

-Volunteer at your local school’s garden.

-Volunteer at a local senior center’s garden.

-Start a neighborhood garden club.

-Share your garden’s bounty with a senior neighbor.

-Have fun doing a gardening project with a senior.

-Deliver houseplants or flowers to a nursing home, assisted living or children’s hospital.

-Donate past issues of gardening magazines to your library, or buy the library a gift subscription.

The four main symptoms of PD are tremor, or trembling in hands, arms, legs, jaw, and face; rigidity, or stiffness of the limbs and trunk; bradykinesia, or slowness of movement; and postural instability, or deteriorated balance and coordination.

As these indications end up being more obvious, patients may have challenges walking, talking, or completing other simple jobs.

Parkinson’s disease usually has an effect on men and women over the age of 50.  Initial indicators of Parkinson’s disease are faint and occur little by little.  In some folks the disease progresses more quickly than in others.  

As the disease progresses, the shaking, or tremor, which affects the majority of Parkinson’s disease patients may begin to obstruct with every day activities.  Other signs may include depression and other emotional changes; difficulty in swallowing, chewing, and speaking; urinary problems or constipation; skin problems; and sleep disruptions.  

There are at the moment no blood or laboratory tests that have been proved to support in diagnosing sporadic PD.  For this reason the diagnosis is based on medical history and a neurological examination.  

The disease can be tricky to diagnose accurately.   Doctors may at times ask for brain scans or laboratory tests in order to rule out other diseases.

Is there any treatment method?
At present, there is no cure for PD, but an assortment of medications supply dramatic ease from the indications.  

Care and Treatment
At the beginning, Parkinson’s disease may not significantly interfere with your life. But for plenty of people, the disease becomes more disabling with time. Home care can help patients as they adjust, and as the disease moves along. This of course, can help them to stay self-reliant for as long as possible. The quality of their life may be dependent in part on their ability to keep on working, take care of a home, care for their family, and remain independent. They may need to have adaptive devices such as canes or walkers as the disease continues.

Factors of Home care that are crucial for a person with PD include:

•       Adjusting their tasks and their household, such as improving their everyday activities and shifting the place of furniture so that they can hang on to something as they navigate around the residence.

•       Consuming healthy foods, including plenty of fruits, vegetables, grains, cereals, legumes, poultry, fish, lean meats, and low-fat dairy products.

•       Exercising and doing physical therapy, which has benefits in both early and advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease.

•       Dealing with tremor, which may include putting a little weight on the hand to help reduce tremor and restore control.

•       Improving speech quality by working with a speech therapist (also called a speech-language pathologist).

•       Reducing problems with eating and drooling by changing how and what they eat.

•       Dealing with “freezing” by various means, such as stepping towards a specific target on the ground.

•       Coping with depression. If they are feeling sad or depressed, ask a friend or family member for help. If these feelings don’t go away, or if they get worse, talk to their doctor. He or she may be able to suggest someone for you to talk to or give them medicine that will help.

•       Dealing with dementia. Dementia is common late in Parkinson’s disease. Symptoms may include confusion and memory loss. If a family member notices that they are confused a lot or have trouble thinking clearly, talk to their doctor. There are medicines that can help dementia in people with Parkinson’s disease.

If a senior in your life is receiving home care services, you might also consider asking their physician about Occupational Therapy services that are often covered by Medicare.

Occupational therapists and occupational therapy assistants focus on “doing” whatever occupations or activities are meaningful to the man or woman. It is occupational therapy’s reason to get past troubles to the solutions that guarantee living life to its fullest. These solutions may be adaptations for how to do a task, changes to the surroundings, or guiding people to redefine their own behaviors.

When using the services of an occupational therapy practitioner, methods and adjustments are tailored for each individual to resolve difficulties, improve function, and aid everyday living actions. The objective is to maximize potential. Through these therapeutic strategies, occupational therapy facilitates folks style their lives, build needed skills, adjust their environments (e,g., home, school, or work) and build health-promoting habits and practices that will make it easy for them to flourish.

By obtaining the full picture into account—a person’s psychological, physical, emotional, and social makeup as well as their environment—occupational therapy assists clients to do the following:

•           Achieve goals
•           Perform at the highest possible level
•           Concentrate on what matters most to them
•           Preserve or rebuild their self-confidence
•           Take part in daily interests that they need or want to do.

Founded in 1917, the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) represents the interests and concerns of more than 140,000 occupational therapists, assistants and students nationwide. The Association educates the public and advances the profession of occupational therapy by providing resources, setting standards including accreditations and serving as an advocate to improve health care. Based in Bethesda, Md., AOTA’s major programs and activities are directed toward promoting the professional development of its members and assuring consumer access to quality services so patients can maximize their individual potential. For more information, go to www.aota.org.

Seasonal allergies, also called allergic rhinitis, cause cold-like characteristics and symptoms including itchiness in the nose, roof of the mouth, throat, eyes and ears, along with watery eyes, runny nose, congestion and sneezing. But unlike a cold, allergies are note caused by a virus; they are caused by an allergic reaction to outdoor or indoor allergens, such as mold, trees, pollen and pet dander.

Allergies, which influence an estimated 60 million people in the United States both young and old, can genuinely have its effects on your daily regimen, and they are a nuisance both in daily life and professionally. Regardless of whether you’re bothered all year or during a specific season, finding out how to cope with allergy symptoms can be crucial to restoring your relaxation and well-being.

This situation can also be pricey to manage. From 2000 to 2005, the cost of treating allergic rhinitis nearly doubled from $6.1 billion to $11.2 billion, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. More than half of that was spent on prescription and over-the-counter medications. Experts recommend patients obtain store-brand, over-the-counter medicines as a helpful means of dealing with both the allergy problem and its included costs.

“There are a number of very effective over-the-counter treatments to address the symptoms of seasonal allergies,” says Dr. William Berger, professor of allergy and immunology at the University of California, Irvine. “In fact, to help patients save money, I would recommend many of the store-brand, non-sedating antihistamines sold at leading retailers and pharmacies, such as Cetirizine or Loratadine. These products are approved by the FDA, but cost significantly less than the brand names.”

According to Berger, numerous allergy sufferers could find greater relief of their symptoms by trying one of these newer, more practical treatments now on the market in the aisle, like Fexofenadine, which just switched from prescription to over-the-counter in 2011.

“Effective management with medicines, ideally before the allergy symptoms start, is key,” he says.

When an aging loved one requires elder care, know of the interactions between over-the-counter medications and the elderly person’s prescription drugs.

You may think that over-the-counter (OTC) medications are always safe and sound. But if you are the elderly and in addition taking prescription medications, this kind of thinking can get you into some issues.

“The average number of prescription medications taken by people over 65 is five or six,” says Michael H. Perskin, MD, an assistant professor of medicine and an internist at the New York University Langone Medical Center. “As you get older, it increases and so does the potential for drug interactions.”

So how can you find effective and protected aid from arthritis and other pain, and cold or allergy symptoms? “When in doubt, ask your pharmacist,” Perskin says. “If you have taken the medication before, it’s probably OK. But if it’s new or your other medication regimen has changed, check it out.”

You can find more facts about the indicators and treatments for allergic rhinitis at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (www.aaaai.org), or the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (www.acaai.org).

Several states are now making driving tests for elderly or for individuals who have been in three or more mishaps in one year, required. This is because older drivers are more inclined to either being injured or killed. Statistics show, older people are more frequently in perilous or fatal wrecks than any other ages. The only way to efficiently make sure that the unsafe drivers are off the roads is for them to be required to take a test to see who should and who shouldn’t be driving. Several see this as discrimination, while other folks see it as a reassurance and a way to know that their loved one will be safe while on the road. Most of the people, especially those with senior family members, are already aware of the probable risks.

A fantastic option for keeping your older parent or loved one safe is to use a home care agency that offers transportation. Home care agencies not only make available transportation but moreover they present the chance for folks to keep their independence. This also avoids isolation and helps them to continue to get around to their own doctor appointments as well as run their own errands.

There are many completely different ways to find out how to get help in your community. Get in touch with your local Area Agency on Aging. If they do not offer transportation, they can help you learn more about your options in order to find someone who does. There are also door-to-door services in most areas and driver volunteers. The door-to-door service does require you to call and give them notice on what your plans are but this may offer the most flexibility.

However, if you are interested in paying a fee for each designated stop you should ask about a fixed route. The fees charged are discounted at senior citizen rates and in some cases are actually free. The option available with driver volunteers usually is a great option for people who need to be taken to a specific place at certain times such as doctor appointments or senior centers. For more information you can call the National Transit Hotline Toll Free at 1-800-527-8279, they can provide you with a list of local home care agencies that can help you find the right alternative to fit your specific needs.