Lakeside Assisted Living

Deidre

We looked at Lakeside Assisted Living. We only saw the assisted living apartments, which were beautiful. We love them, and we saw the memory, which is literally through a door. I loved it. It was beautiful and very homey. It looked like a place where my dad was going to find all the mental stimulation you could use. When you walked in the front doors, there was a beautiful foyer with a fireplace and there was a coffee bar area where people could sit and have a cup of coffee and a Danish and visit with friends. Then there was another area that was a library with all those different magazines and newspapers and couches and another social gathering place. They have a little movie theater area. It looked almost like a hotel when you walked in the front lobby, it was just gorgeous. When you first walked in the front doors, if you went to the right or the left, you were in the assisted living apartments. There were like 20 apartments in each hallway. There were only like 40 assisted living apartments, but each apartment had a small patio, a beautiful little kitchenette, a huge bathroom, and a walk-in closet. There is more space than what my parents have now. They had patios right off their living room, so they could put a table and chairs out on the patio and have a place to sit and be outside. There was a walking path that went all the way around the building, but they would never get off campus because surrounding the walking path was the independent villas. We walked the whole perimeter. It's not that big, it's not even a mile all the way around. There is no nursing home, you go right into what they call memory care, and they don't even treat it like a nursing home. It's still apartment living, it is a smaller-sized apartment, and the only difference between it and the assisted living portion is that you have a locked door. There is no outdoor patio in the memory care, but there's a beautiful outdoor courtyard for them that is as large as the outside area from the assisted living. It's got waterfalls, bird feeders, an outdoor firepit, and all sorts of things out there. It's just gorgeous. The only thing there is that they have a little bit more staff watching where the residents are. They still go through to the same nail salon and haircut place. If my parents moved there, they would go into an assisted living apartment right now, but when it came time for my mom and dad to need memory care, they would just go through a set of doors. But they have kitchens where like I could go in and make a meal with my mom and dad if I wanted to and I could cook a meal for them and we could have a family gathering in their memory care unit. They do demonstrations of different types of foods and stuff. They keep the residents much more alert longer, but they go all the way through hospice. So, once I moved my parents over the memory care, if that's the case, they would stay there till the day they die, I would not have to move them again. We did not eat there. We could smell the food, we got to see the food, and it smelled delicious. Their menu was probably the biggest menu of the three places we visited as far as the selection of menu. They have more food time options. If you had a doctor's appointment or something, you can still go in and be able to get food right now. Here, you're also allowed a toaster as long as you were in assisted living, and you could have a one-cup coffee pot like my dad's Keurig. So they could have more options and more times a day, which was a good thing. Also, there's a coffee bar up at the front lobby that you could sit up there any time of day and have a cup of coffee or a cup of tea or something else. I had staff come up and introduce themselves to me. They said, 'We're the nurse that would take care of your parents as long as they're in assisted living. And then this is the nurse that would take care of your parents when they went to memory care.' They were on opposite sides of a wall, so they communicated with each other, and they all knew each other. It was beautiful. I would love to move there if I could. I would be happy.