Mum's memory. Is she just being lazy or is it something else?

Shopping lists take a lot of brain power actually.

What usual items are missing from my fridge/pantry - memory.

What items will run out soon - time judgement .

What meals do I want next week - forward planning.

Trouble with shopping lists were red flags for 2 relatives. One would buy only 2-5 items at a time (lack of planning & judgement). This evolved quickly into loss of cooking skills so meal delivery service used instead.

The other would only list sweets (impulse control, lack of motivation/lazy but also planning deficits). The same/similar order delivered weekly works ok.

Be on the look out for lack of nutrition & dehydration. Eg: prepared meals still all in the fridge/freezer & just cheese & cracker wrappers in the bin. A common one I've heard is tea & toast, breakfast cereal or even icecream for every meal.

Yes, its a decline. My Mom got like this. First it was not being able to balance her checkbook, then she couldn't write a check. She did shop for herself with me right behind. Always trying to by junk food for my nephew who didn't need it. WaWa was not that far away that he could ride his bike to get a "junk" fix. Got his exercise too. With Mom, I gave her a white board so when she ran out of something, she wrote it down.

Like all the ideas especially taking a picture of the fridge. You should pretty much know approximately what Mom eats. She probably doesn't cook that much. I would just go with that. If she doesn't eat something u bought, then don't buy it again. But I would not go to the store for her constantly.

I would suggest a good clean out if u haven't already done this. My MIL bought stuff thinking company would eat it. Most of that stuff became expired. I still can taste that rancid water cracker she put out for us to eat. When she was in rehab, I cleaned out. She had a pork roast that was 2 yrs old in the freezer. Rolls and bread molding in the fridge. We told her over and over to wait to go grocery shopping until we got there. We tried to take her out to eat. She bought stuff she never would have eaten thinking one of the kids would like it.

My mother had the same problem with making lists. When she was in her own apartment, I took pictures of the things she ate and kept stocked. These were in her refrigerator, as well as in her cabinets.

Then, I made a list of all of these items, plus a few more that I thought of. I kept this list on my Google Drive. It was easy to add or subtract items.

I printed a month’s worth of lists, and gave one to my mother for each week. I wrote the day and date of the next shopping trip across the top.

She would circle the items that she needed, as they came to mind. I had these items listed alphabetically, and later even added the aisle numbers in our grocery store.

This all really made a difference in the amount of panic that would happen as she thought of items she would need. It also reinforced the boundary that I had established regarding the amount of shopping trips we were willing to make.

Best wishes to you!

My husband did all the shopping for my FIL when he lived alone, and one thing he did each week was after he filled the fridge and pantry, he took pictures of all the food. This gave him an idea of what he had and what he needed to pick up next week.

It also helped when he’d get a call from FIL saying he was out of something - usually it was he couldn’t find or see something and DH could just look at his phone and see what he had.

We ended up with a pretty good idea of how much he would eat of each kind of food and just plan accordingly - e.g., a loaf of bread, 7 apples, half gallon of milk. It only worked because he was such a creature of habit. He did not stray from his daily diet very much.