We are still crafting here at Ashby House. Across the country many children have been colouring and painting rainbows to spread hope in response to the Coronavirus.

We thought that we would join in with this movement! For the past couple of weeks our residents have been painting rainbows to put around the care home so that the community passing can see as well as our fellow residents.

We have also have a few school children painting and writing letters to us to lift our spirits and inspire hope! Our residents have loved all of it and were so happy to read and see everyone’s creations.

We have created a ‘Smile Board’ to display all the wonderful things we have received!

Here at Ashby love is in the air and we have been busy this week making lots of arts and crafts for our display board, including love heart trees and cupid ‘Hello Kitty.’ We have also made a hallway of hanging hearts leading up to the display!

To finish off the week we had some valentine’s day messages delivered to our residents, these were accompanied by a rose and from their loving relatives. Later that day we had a Valentine’s tea party - the dining room was filled with red and pink decorations and themed sweet treats, retro love songs were playing. Altogether we all had a ‘love’ – ly day filled with joy and happiness!

At Ashby House this week we have been celebrating two special days Burns Night and Chinese New Year. For Burns night our residents took part in making the delicious Scottish Pudding “Cranachan”, made with cream, oats, honey and raspberries, fun was had making it and enjoyed it even more tasting it! We had lovely decorations up with all things Scottish and Robert Burns, also our residents had fun with Scottie Dogs Arts and Crafts too.

For the Chinese New Year celebrations we have lovely display board covered in art, made by our residents bright and colourful , including rats, as it is the year of the rat, and Chinese dragons in all lovely colours, we finished it off with a Chinese New Year tea party, with lovely Chinese music playing and  some Chinese food and plenty of tea and chats, lots of fun was had by all.

Our activities team members have been busy organising a garden project. We are very fortunate to have multiple gardens at Ashby House and we now the lovely Jeffrey who is our gardener; he is underway transforming the gardens. Our residents are now helping Jeffrey to make the garden look pretty in their gardening club.

We also have scouts coming in the summer to help in our sensory garden. To help us with this home base have kindly donated lots of garden products including plants, plant pots, gardening tools and much more. We would like to say a special thank you to Liam who helped to kindly donate to us. We are now very excited to undergo our garden project.

On Christmas day the residents, relatives and staff all had a wonderful day. With all the decorations that were up including our lovely trees, we were ready for Father Christmas to arrive, which he did, handing out presents to all our residents. The dining tables were set festively for our Christmas meals and a lovely dinner was enjoyed by all. Festive music, fun and laughter filled the home.

Here at Ashby House we are in full swing for Christmas. We have been busy with putting up our decorations, partying and now it is time to decorate some cards to give to our relatives. Our residents had a fun afternoon with the activities team making Christmas cards for their loved ones, they used stickers, glitter, paints and their creativity to design their own cards and write in their Christmas cards themselves. Everyone enjoyed reminiscing about past Christmases and time with their loved ones.