Hi August,

Yes, exactly.   Routine is best for people who have alzheimers.   I think
that although they have no conscious memory of their "usual" activities each
day, there is some part of the brain that registers repeated actions.   In
helping my mother in law dress, for example, I would always put on her right
shoe first, then the left one.   She seemingly "remembered" this, and always
put forth the right foot first, even when I didn't have the shoe ready just
yet.   That was the same with other little caregiving matters, and I would
think how odd it was that there seemed to be some "memory" of some kind.
But certainly there was no conscious memory of these things.

Whenever we tried to do something out of the ordinary, no matter how small,
it got my mother in law's routine mixed up, and somehow irritated her.
Sometimes some simple unusual activity, like a holiday for example, would
cause her to obsess about it for a long time.   She would get "stuck" on the
holiday and think it was happening again every day for weeks afterwards,
till some other thing would catch her attention.

Our local daycare center made a big fuss of every holiday, and it was nice
because the crafts they did and the different activities were geared around
the holidays over the course of the year.   I think in some way that helped
to break the obsessiveness a little.

This is a perfect time to say once again, that I have no idea how we would
have managed as long or as well as we did without the daycare center.   They
were wonderful.   A real lifesaver for us all.