A Special Assisted Living Easter

Easter is a wonderful holiday. It means so much to people around the world. It’s a time for gathering with families and friends. And it means Spring is here. Our ‘Assisted Living Easter’ was no exception.

The planning for our assisted living Easter at our four homes in Surprise and Goodyear started well before Easter. We reached out to our neighbors through the Next Door website. If you haven’t tried Next Door for your neighborhood, you might want to. It’s a great way for neighbors to help each other out. Here’s a quick video about it:

We have four different logins for our Next Door account. One for the neighborhood around each of our homes. We were hoping that some of our neighbors could help us. Here is what we asked:

We have some assisted living group homes around the Surprise and Goodyear area. We’re always looking for new activities for our residents. One idea we came up with is to have an Easter Egg hunt in the parks near the homes. Invite all the kids in the neighborhood to help our residents find some Easter Eggs that we would hide. My question is whether people would be willing to bring their kids to something like this. Would this be a good idea? Would you be interested if you have some kids? Thanks.

There were a lot of responses to our post. All of them were favorable. And some were volunteering to help out.

Assisted Living Easter Meals

Our 4 homes each had their own special Easter gathering. Many of our families and friends came to our homes in Surprise and Goodyear to celebrate the Holiday with their loved ones. It made us feel like we had a very large family all coming over for dinner.

The managers at all four homes are great cooks. A special shout out to each of them for putting on such great meals:

• Lydia at our home on N. 164thLane in Surprise
• Laura at our home on W. Banff Lane in Surprise
• Nora at our home on N. 135thDrive in Surprise
• Aurora at our home on W. Campbell Ave in Goodyear

I think our residents will be eating some leftovers for a while!

Time for the Easter Egg Hunt

After a great lunch, the real fun began. Some of our residents helped stuff the Easter Eggs earlier in the week. Our biggest challenge was making sure the candy didn’t melt in the Arizona sun. Even though it was only in the low 80’s (pretty cool for Arizona), those egg interiors can sure heat up!

So we went to the local parks (there’s a park near each of our homes) and put out the eggs about 15 minutes prior to our assisted living Easter egg hunts.

Then we let the dogs out! Our residents, caregivers, and some of our neighbors started looking. We had some great finders out there. The searchers were able to find the eggs very quickly. Some of our neighbors brought their kids who really helped.

Seeing all the generations help each other reminded all of us what Easter is all about. It made us really appreciate all the great people in neighborhoods around Surprise and Goodyear.

The day ended with many of our neighbors volunteering to come over to our homes in the future. They wanted to hang out with our residents and do some activities with them. What a sweet gesture.

Overall, we had a fantastic assisted living Easter. I’m sure I speak for all our residents and staff when I say that I hope you had a wonderful Easter with your family. And Welcome to Spring!