How you manage the effects of caregiving on the grandkids, etc?

Your daughter, your family should be your priority.
When your daughter is your age, and she has a young family do you want her to make her family a priority or you? (this should be a talking point for you and your husband and the rest of the family..the "what if's" in life. Make your wishes known)
spend the time with your daughter..you will NEVER get this time back. She will graduate from High School once. She will go to Senior Prom once.
If your dad were well cognitively I am sure he would agree.

What do you need to do for Dad that takes precedence over ur daughter. He is safe and cared for. I was 5 min from my Mom so I could stop in everyday. It could be bringing her laundry, pickin it up. Bring her supplies. I stayed no more than a half hour. Longer if something was going on. I never missed anything that had to do with my family. So he freeks out. There r meds. You have a right to ur life. Don't tell him your going on vacation or out for the night. When he calls, ignore it. The AL will call u in an emergency. The whole purpose of placing a parent in an AL is so your not so burdened.

When u married and had children, ur first responsibility was ur family. Parents are only part of ur life, they should not become all of it. Again, Dad is safe. He now relies on the staff. Thats what he pays for.

I am in the exact same situation. I have prioritized my kids, 18 and 16, as they need me and there is nothing, I can do to improve my mother's situation, she is 90 years old, bed ridden with dementia in an SNF. I didn't cause this, age caused this.

There is everything I can do to improve my kids' lives through supporting them at school, their search to try and navigate their futures, their events and even their dreams.

I make this work by limiting visits to my mom as I simply don't have enough time to support my kids, work full-time, and peruse some of my own hobbies/interests. I also try to stick to a schedule for visits that works for all of us. My mom is more coherent mid-morning, so I limit my visits to this time only.

Good luck with all of it, I know it is hard, but my advice is do what works for you and feel no guilt if that means you need to focus on your daughter and step back from your father.

If he was, before his cognitive decline began, a doting, living, valuable grandparent, HE would want you to put your daughter first.

His freaking out is unfortunately not nearly as damaging to him as exposure to it is to your daughter.

Hopefully, he enjoyed the love and respect of his family when he was fully able to participate in family life.

But that Dad, Grandpa, is gone now. He lives in residential care so that he can be cared for safely and lovingly. His setting was hopefully chosen with reverence and respect for who he had been, and how much richer your lives were for having had his love, and loving him.

Launching a graduating child into her new world is really a bigger broader responsibility, and I know by experience, that you only get one shot to do it. I tried, and failed, to be both.

I’m grateful to have a wonderful relationship now with my son, who had cherished his grandmother, but couldn’t let her needs become part of HIS senior year. He was so right, and I was SO WRONG.

Your father’s life won’t be significantly altered by putting him first, but your child’s might be.

Hoping respectfully that you can figure out a way to do this better than I did.

Why do you need to miss events if your father is on care?

If Grandpa still needs this much assistance in AL, he probably needs a higher level of care. Take and enjoy your vacations, if he freaks out the staff is being well paid to handle it. It is not your problem. Your children, spouse, and self should come WAY before Grandpa on your priorities list. You're protecting your daughter by blocking him from contacting her, so that's a major step in the right direction.

That’s a tough one, but daughter should always come first. Do whatever you need to do to attend her events and be available to her. Minimize conversations about him and his care because a sick LO’s situation tends to take over the whole family interaction and change the dynamic.

He’s lived most of his life, and she’s just starting hers. If anyone is shortchanged, it should be him.

Your daughter is now grown up.
It is time to sit with her and talk. It is time to acknowledge to HER, not to us, what she has lost through your care of your Dad. You can say you are uncertain that you did it right, that you may have given too much care to Dad and not enough to her, that you hope she never experiences being in the middle of the sandwich, owing so much to 2 generations, and tell her if she ever is you hope she will give more to her children, her first obligation, than you did.
Just let her know you recognize the ways in which she was failed.

A good and loving parent gets forgiven almost ANYTHING, especially if they go to the child and tell them they understand the places they failed.
If she says "Oh, that's OK, Mom" let her know that it WASN'T OK. And that you are sorry. And encourage her to disengage from granddad other than loving visits when SHE chooses, SHORT visits.

I am writing this as an adult who was a grandchild once upon a time with grandparents living in the home. At first, when they weren’t living at our home, I remember my mother leaving in the dark of night in a snowstorm to pick up grandpa off the floor. Once they moved in, my parents were all about grandma and grandpa. There were the smells of incontinence, the need to be quiet around the house. As a teen, I had quite a lot of difficulty with this situation, acted out in school, grades dropped, didn’t want to go home. It is now 60 years since then and I feel the lack of attention from my parents during that time and having my grandparents pass away in my home had a major impact on my life. I think I was lonely and depressed and my friends who weren’t in the same situation as I was weren’t much help. Please consider your children in any situation where you assume care of your parents. Please talk to them about their lives and about the impact on them of “losing” parental care.

She's learning a lesson in caring for our elders. That's not a bad thing.

However, I wonder if you're overdoing the "care" side of things if Dad's in a facility being cared for already. As others have said, your daughter comes first. That's not to say you ignore a genuine emergency with Dad to watch cheerleading, but it's important to keep balance.