Our residents really enjoyed watching the garden fireworks on Bonfire Night at Carmel Lodge. We had a lovely night enjoyed by all residents and staff.

Trick or Treat was in full swing during Halloween at Ashmead. The Activities team dressed appropriately and toured the whole home offering chocolate and biscuit bars on a specially decorated mobile trolley.

There is no end to the talents of our residents at Cedar Court, they take on every challenge set them!  They were very keen to take part in the Cranleigh competition for the best 'Guy' to be thrown on the local bonfire. Our residents who are living with dementia created the beautiful artwork with paper spinning wheels, which they all thoroughly enjoyed.  The 'Guys' were created by some of the people living at Cedar Court, assisted by Kathryn our activities assistant. A big thank you goes out to Kathryn’s parents for making the Paper Mache heads.

Not only did our residents enjoy preparing for Halloween with pumpkin painting, but our staff did to!

We set up our pumpkin painting station for the staff to show off their artistic skills ,they had a lot to live up to after seeing all the fantastic colourful decorations produced by the people living with us, but everyone was suitably impressed by all of these creations🎃👻

We had a fabulous day celebrating the care awards with our residents. We were delighted to win Best New Comer for our fabulous Home Manager Angela Galloway and Administrator of the year for our Admin Michael Lawrence.

We started the day with a fish and chip lunch followed a few glasses of Nosecco during the awards and home made cakes.

The residents enjoyed getting dressed up and were happy to be part of the annual 7th MMCG and Countrywide Care Awards which took place on Friday 24th September. We had such a wonderful time with some celebrity special guests attending our red carpet event and a lovely buffet made by the home chef. 

Well done to all the well-deserved winners. Roll on next year.

We had a coffee afternoon to raise funds for MacMillan. Residents helped set up the Tombola stall and enjoyed an afternoon of fun and chat. They are so pleased we raised £47. Our tombola stall was made up of Body Shop products and the ladies were thrilled when somehow they all won something.

We celebrated a belated Macmillan Coffee morning in September to raise vital funds for this amazing charity and all they do to support the community.  The day of the Macmillan coffee morning coincided with our annual care awards so we decided to host this a week later so our wonderful residents had two parties which they loved.

On Friday 19th October we were delighted to be presented with second prize from Great Aycliffe town council for best community garden. We were absolutely over the moon to receive this award. We would like to say a huge thank you to Ken for all his hard work he has put into our beautiful garden we really do appreciate it, all his hard work has paid off.

We had such a lovely afternoon watching the care awards and cheering for the nominated staff across the homes and we enjoyed a lovely buffet of the residents favourite foods.

Well done from Garden Hill to all of the winners in the region and country from our team to yours and we hope to see you there next year.