January Thus Far

I've been sick this month. Like 'knocked flat on my back, ended up really dehydrated and all' kind of sick. Caleb has been sick this month and ended up needing antibiotics that smell horrible and according to him taste just as bad (he's allergic to amoxicillin and so they usually give him a grainy antibiotic called Biaxin that is apparently now super minty). Ty has been sick this month and is currently home from school for the second day in a row. Brettley has been sick this month and coughed so hard this morning that he threw up. With all of that said.......
2014 is STILL already so much better than 2013, ha ha. Maybe it's just my state of mind forcing it to be, but either way it doesn't matter. I'm so much happier these past few weeks.

Had a big shocker of a day last Saturday. Earlier this month my mum had her thyroid removed, so we'd been texting a lot since she was really bored during the day, but couldn't really talk. On Saturday I decided to give her a call and see if she was up to talking yet since it had been almost 2 weeks since her surgery. I found out during the phone call that the reason she'd had her thyroid removed was because she had thyroid cancer. Um, say what?!? Anyway, she has a clean bill of health now, they got it all and next month she gets to do her radioactive iodine treatment and spend 2 days in isolation. John and I are trying to think of which superpower she should try to get while she's radioactive. Anyway, you'd think that after my FIL passing away from pancreatic cancer almost 2 years ago now that I would have learned that parents aren't invincible, but apparently I still felt like my mom was. I cried and cried. Later in the afternoon that day I got the news that my dad heard back about a procedure he'd had done in the fall and because of the results (precancerous masses removed), I now have to start going for routine cancer screening. BLAH! I keep thinking in my head that I'm way too young for this (29), but right now I'm just massively grateful that, at least for right now, both of my parents are okay.

On to more fun news...I have started losing weight again. We waited until I was stable enough to do it, and so far I have lost 4.6 lbs, which I'm super excited about. I was kind of worried at first since I am losing weight so fast at the moment, so I talked to John about it. He reminded me that I'm not skipping meals (I'm actually eating 3 meals and at least 2 snacks per day), so I'm certainly not starving myself. It's just that I'm eating smarter and not having huge fatty snacks several times per week anymore. Then we realized I'm probably losing  it so fast right now because at the same time as I started counting calories I also went from drinking pretty much no water and several Coke Zeros per day to drinking at least 2 litres of water and rarely even having 1 Coke Zero in a day. It was a huge change that I was really nervous about making (I'm not the hugest fan of unflavoured beverages), but it's working great for me. I keep a jug of water in the fridge to fill my water bottle with so that I have super cold water to drink. The hardest part was the caffeine withdrawl, but drinking so much water is making it a lot easier on me this time.

So that's kind of been our month so far. I'm just mostly taking it easy and trying to keep up with this crazy weather that can't decide whether it's winter or spring in January. Next week I'm cutting out white grains and red meats from my regular diet for health reasons, and I'm actually really looking forward to next week's meal plan :)