2Sisters Speak: Surviving the Sandwich Generation

In this episode, Michelle interviews expert guest Jan Latorre-Stiller, the Executive Director of Cambridge Neighbors, a member of the Village to Village Network. Cambridge Neighbors (CN) is a membership-driven organization helping adults living in Arlington, Belmont, Cambridge, Somerville, and Watertown Massachusetts stay in the homes and neighborhoods they love. Three key takeaways from this epis...

What is adult family mediation? Join us on this episode where we welcome guest Halee Burg, an Affiliate Mediator with Elder Decisions®, a division of Agreement Resources, LLC . Sometimes families get stuck. We can't agree and we don't know how to move forward. Adult family or elder mediation is an effective method of making difficult family decisions. Mediators are highly skilled, neutral, conflic...

Are you caring for a loved one at home and need some support but your loved one won't let anyone else provide their care? What can you do when only you will do? Join us this episode as we discuss some strategies for getting a loved one to accept outside support. Three key takeaways from this episode: First, get to the bottom of why only you will do. There may be many reasons why your loved one is...

Have you promised your loved one you will never put them in a nursing home? People make promises like this all the time, that they have every intention to keep but may not be able to deliver upon. Keeping a loved one at home with in-home care is much more possible when you have a plan in place for if/when it may not work. Aging in place at home requires some strategy and a plan for if it fails. Yo...

Choosing a nursing home is not something people want to do. It is a need-driven decision and a daunting one at that. Join Nursing Home Specialist, Emily Rogue, LNHA, and Senior Care Consultant, Michelle Woodbrey on this episode where they discuss what to do and what not to do when choosing a nursing home. Avoiding nursing home care is among the most commonly expressed wishes of older Americans. Af...

Do you have a hard time saying, "no"? Many, many people do - especially women. We may be afraid to disappoint people, but the problem usually lies in our expectations of ourselves. When is good enough, good enough? Keeping our sanity when feeling squeezed involves learning to accept less from ourselves and this means saying, "no." Michelle Woodbrey, Alyson Powers and Kristine Callahan discuss lear...

Creative solutions are often necessary when creating a plan of care for a parent, especially when someone can no longer live alone. Many families look to share the responsibilities, but is moving your loved one between the homes of siblings a good idea? A listener wrote to us and asked us to talk about whether it is a good idea to move her mom between the homes of her and her siblings every few mo...

Cathie Briggette is the Co-Founder of Herself360 , an online women's magazine designed to create a platform for women to feel more connected. Herself360 started out of a need for women to have a stronger village to be able to support one another. Cathie has been a client of 2Sisters Senior Living Advisors as well. She and her siblings have forged their own little village in support of their mother...

Planning documents are for everyone and this is a good place to start the conversation. We should all have these few critical documents in place in the event something happens and we can't make decisions for ourselves. These include: Health Care Proxy Power of attorney Living Will Regardless of age, unfortunate circumstances can happen to anyone and being prepared only serves to lessen the impact...

What can people do to advocate for themselves at work? Meghan Steinberg emphasizes the importance of prioritizing ourselves. She became a caregiver when her husband had an accident that resulted in a traumatic brain injury a few years ago. She was just 2 years into starting her business, SteinbergHR, and her son was only 3 years old at the time. SteinbergHR is a boutique HR firm providing full-ser...

It is not a great idea to ask directions of someone who has never been where you are going. This is a mistake many people make soliciting recommendations for senior care options. When we ask friends and neighbors or crowdsource on social media, we get a bunch of well-intentioned advice that may, or may not, be helpful based on our unique situation. So how do we know which advice to listen to? Mich...

This podcast, like almost everything else for us, is an experiential learning process. We are learning by doing. One thing we have learned so far is that releasing a podcast episode every other week is a better fit for our schedules. As adult children raising our own children and running a business, we practice two things that are relevant to this decision. One is to constantly be evaluating our p...

At some point everybody stops driving, but how it happens is different in every story. Michelle and Alyson reveal their currently evolving story of getting their father, who has Parkinson's disease, to stop driving. Kristine also tells us about what it took to get her mom to stop driving. We discuss some practical approaches and offer resources which may (or may not) be helpful in getting your lov...

Emily is contemplating daycare for Penny, but she is struggling with the idea of giving care for her daughter over to strangers. There are parallels between the design of a daycare and the benefits of that environment for the development of a growing child and the design of a memory care environment for the support and independence of someone with dementia. Here's a link to an article we wrote, "T...

Having your ducks in a row in the event a loved one needs to go to the hospital unexpectedly can make a huge difference in everyone's stress level. What are the things they may need? What are the things you may need? Some things are naturally personal preference, but other things are necessities. Here are our suggestions for what to have ready if your loved one needs to go to the hospital unexpect...

A helicopter parent is a parent who pays extremely close attention to a child's or children's experiences and problems, particularly at educational institutions. Helicopter parents are so named because, like helicopters, they "hover overhead," overseeing every aspect of their child's life constantly. Michelle, Alyson, Emily and Kristine discuss the concept of acceptable or negotiated risk. The bal...

People in search of care options for an aging loved one need to become familiar with things they probably never wanted to. We have callers who are commonly confused and need clarification. For example, what does insurance cover regarding senior care? Panel of experts: Michelle Woodbrey Certified Senior Advisor (CSA)® Certified Placement & Referral Specialist (CPRS) Certified Dementia Practitioner...

During this episode, Alyson is away travelling with family so Michelle and Emily have a discussion reminiscing about how Emily started working for 2Sisters Senior Living Advisors. When is it time to give up on something that you've spent so much time working toward? Emily worked hard for many years to actualize her dream of becoming a Nursing Home Administrator only to realize it was not her dream...

How do we help our parents when they fear intervention? How bad does it have to get?   Joined by Alyson, Emily and Kristine in this episode, Michelle tells us about her daughter waiting to tell her about a cavity until it was a crevASSe the size of the Grand Canyon.  Similarly, we see this with our aging loved ones who can minimize situations or withhold information out of fear of change.     Join...

We take on a case study about wandering and dementia. Michelle and Alyson, joined by Emily and Kristine, present options for someone whose mother had a scary wandering event. Resources mentioned in the episode: Alzheimer's Association https://www.alz.org/ Please click the button to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes and leave a review if your favorite podcast app has that ability. Thank you!...

"Unspoken Expectations are premeditated resentments." – Neil Strauss In this episode, Michelle and Alyson are joined by Emily and Kristine. Who feels guilty? Do you? We do, and we even listen to Kristine when she tells us that guilt is a useless emotion. How do we set the right expectations with our loved ones so that we don't live in a world of guilt? Please click the button to subscribe so you d...

How in the world do you find time for yourself? Baby weight, the freshmen 15, and pandemic pounds are "socially acceptable" reasons for carrying extra weight, but what about caregivers like us? What about aging parent pounds? Kristine shares techniques on how to take some time for ourselves. She had us drooling over her description of her morning rituals. While many of us can't fathom having a sel...

When your plans fall through what are you going to do? Our plow company didn't show up after the recent 29 inches of snow. We were unprepared. This isn't unlike the calls we get when a home care agency can't fill a shift. In this episode, Michelle, Alyson, Kristine and Emily discuss levels of planning and why, when you have 29 inches of snow, is not the time you want to be looking for a shovel. Pl...

What is revenge procrastination insomnia and how did it lead to this podcast? We stay up way too late spending time procrastinating on going to bed, sucked in by social media and binge-watching TV. We noticed groups all over social media platforms offering support for adults who are struggling to care for their aging loved ones. But people are still searching for more. Alyson and I felt called to...

Something's got to give, but how do we know what? And when? The line between our personal lives and our professional lives is blurrier than ever with so many of us working from home these days. It's a new level of multitasking and, sometimes, when we hit a groove, it can feel like we're managing it all ok. But… "The hunter that chases two rabbits, catches neither." – Confucius Are we actually effe...