We had such a great Chanukah at Cedar Village. Hope you had a chance to enjoy some of it with us! Our Chanukah party on Sunday featured the Cincinnati Klezmer Project and they played to a packed house. It is wonderful to share those moments as a Cedar Village community. On Wednesday morning, we had a great time making latkes in the Health Care Center. Some of our volunteers and the Resident Life staff pitched in and helped residents make delicious latkes-from scratch! We had some wonderful conversations about the memories connected with latkes and holidays and it was a very special morning from start to finish.

Teepa Snow was here this week too! Teepa, as you may remember, is a nationally known expert and educator on dementia care. She is working with us on a quarterly basis and helping us train our staff to become Dementia Care Specialists. Our first group of staff to be trained has graduated the first of four levels and this week was trained on level two. We will begin to train the rest of our staff with a goal to have all of our staff achieve level one certification by Summer 2011. What does this mean? The dementia care specialist program involves a deeper understanding of the progression of dementia; the levels of the disease process; skills and techniques to be used with individuals at the different levels to meet their needs more effectively. It's classroom education to begin but the real learning is on the units as folks practice, learn by doing and make permanent changes in their approach. We think this is vital and we look forward to telling you more about it as we move forward.

Also on the horizon is the expansion of our rehab service. We're going to renovate to be able to provide state-of-the-art rehab services for both inpatients and outpatients. We believe strongly that this is vital for our residents, both today and in the future, and we are excited to see it move forward. Construction will begin next week and we'll share more details with you as we progress!

Stay tuned for the 2010 version of Cedar Village's music video! We had a blast filming it early this week and we'll be sharing it with you very soon-