The Ding Dong Mat

I love the new ding dong mat.This 101 year old woman I talk care of just got a ding dong mat thanks to some very savvy care givers. I never knew such a thing existed. I like to do the over night shifts because I am then free during the days to do the things I love to do like play golf, play bridge, go to garden club, have lunch with friends, garden, laze around. At this point my schedule involves 2 over night shifts for the same person, one all day sunday which I am trying to change and a 2 hour shift on wed mornings. That's 38 hours a week... enough for me. My overnight shifts are my favorites. Anyway, the LOL (little old lady) I take care of gets up many times times during the night to go to the bathroom. At least 3 - 4 times and some nights more. They could just wear Depends and stay in bed but they don't for a variety of reasons mostly that they are scratchy. So our job is to get up when they get up, follow them into the bathroom, help them with whatever, leave the bathroom so they can pee in privacy, return to the bathroom to help them redress and walk them back to bed. We do this so they don't fall down and hurt themselves. Recovery from anything at this age is brutally long. Many times we miss our que because these LOLs can be very quiet especially when there is wall to wall carpeting. So with this new ding dong pad we are sure not to miss a beat. Here is how it works: you slip the pad underneath the sheet where they do most of their sleeping. LOLs don't move around in bed much, certainly not like I who tosses and turns all night. You slip this pad under their sheets and set up the monitor in the room where the care giver stays. Then when LOL gets up the monitor goes off and we hear Ding Dong Ding Dong until we turn it off and go into to help them. We don't miss a thing. This is ingenious. It would be great too for sleep walkers etc.I love this new invention and wish I had had this for a couple of other jobs. From now on I am going to insist that a Ding Dong mat be available for over night shifts. No Ding Dong, no shift.Follow up:The Ding Dong mat didn't work the other night. I was frightened actually. I had come to rely on it. I think what happened was that she wasn't quite sleeping on the whole thing and so when she got up to go to the bathroom she really got off of it so the alarm never sounded. I have to say though that that mat has worked 9.5 out of 10 times so in my book it is still a keeper. Just thought I'd share that.