So Many Blessings

Last week was kind of a huge week for me in a lot of ways. I received a lot of tender mercies from the Lord. John was home with me every day except for Thursday. Instead, my dad was with me that day to take care of my kids for me. My dad also stayed with the kids both times John and I had to go to the ER. At the beginning of the week I had no clue what was even wrong with me. I was in so much pain and had no clue how I'd injured myself. It turns out, I didn't. Thanks to someone leaving a comment on my blog, I realized that I actually had an abscess. I went in to the ER days sooner than I would have if it hadn't been suggested to me. I had amazing people helping me while I was in the ER. On Thursday evening, as our bishop sat in our living room for a visit, he was inspired then and there to give me a new calling. I will be honest, I cried tears of happiness and relief. Within a minute of him extended the calling to me, I physically felt myself coming back to life. It was that pronounced. John saw it in me too. I got the opportunity to watch almost all of the 4 gold medal games I'd wanted to watch (I missed the last few ends of men's curling when I was back in the ER on Friday for my follow up). I also got to watch the amazing hockey game when our Canadian boys beat the US on Friday with one of my friends. On Friday I was very nervous about them taking the packing out of my wound and if they'd need to repack it. I had heard it can all be extremely painful. I was so grateful that I only had a moment of pain while the packing was taken out and was grateful again when the doctor told me it was small enough and healing well enough that it didn't need to be packed again. What a huge blessing! And yesterday I started the day with Caleb. We woke up at 4:30 am to watch the men's hockey team win gold. What an amazing memory it is for me to have shared that with him. I will remember it for years to come. And then in the afternoon, during ward conference, I was sustained as the Mia Maids adviser. I had all of those girls in activity days as well as when I was serving over Beehives. I have served one of the girls in Mia Maids in 6 different callings in the (not quite) 8 years I've been in this ward. I am so grateful for all of the good things that happened to me during the past week, and also that I was willing to see and focus on them rather than just the negative things that were occurring. My testimony grew leaps and bounds during the week. I truly am blessed!

Huge Thank You!

I'd like to send a huge thank you to the person who made an anonymous comment on my last post. I looked into what you suggested, and you were exactly right. I went in to the ER yesterday morning, they confirmed it and sedated me to drain the abscess. I have been pretty drugged up for the past 36 hours and been in a fair bit of pain, but I'm starting to feel a LOT better. I am so grateful for that anonymous comment, it probably saved me days more of being in really bad pain.

How Did That Even Happen?

Somehow last week I managed to bruise my tailbone. I have NO idea how it happened. I don't do any kind of sport, I didn't fall. Absolutely nothing sticks out to me about what could have caused it. At any rate, I've been in a lot of really bad pain most of the time. It hurts the least when I'm laying on my stomach, but even then it's still not totally gone. I have found 2 things so far that have made a dent in the pain. The first is Tiger Balm. I can't say enough good things about that stuff. It's the only thing that helps with my upper back pain and it's the only pain reliever I've tried that's even made a dent in the pain in my tailbone. John also went out and got me a seat cushion this morning with a U cut out of the back so that my tailbone isn't sitting on anything when I'm sitting down. Apparently a bruised tailbone takes 4 weeks to recover from. Here's hoping for a quick 4 weeks...

Thoughts and Reflections

I realized this morning that over the past 12.5 months, I've actually become a lot more private of a person. Hardly anyone knows about the bigger things that have gone on in my life. I'm okay with that, some of it just doesn't belong out there. I wasn't even going to blog about the whole cancer thing, but then I realized that since I really suck at journalling, I should at least have some record of this somewhere. At any rate, here are 10 things that have happened in the past year that I'm willing to share:

1 - I was released from the Young Women presidency in our ward in a VERY VERY VERY emotional meeting with the bishopric member. Apparently they drew straws over who had to be the one to tell me. I still miss it a lot. But I am enjoying the calling I'm currently in.

2 - After spending years growing my hair out and getting it back to it's natural colour as well, I chopped it off super short. I enjoyed it being short, but have now started the process of growing it out again.

3 - Caleb lost his first tooth. He was over the moon about it and has lost a few more since then. In our house, we buy the kids a milkshake when they lose a tooth, which he loves.

4 - We found out that Brettley is allergic to something in creamy salad dressings. Since then, I have made a LOT of homemade Caesar salad dressing.

5 - I burnt my arm really badly while making Rice Krispies squares. I have a permanent scar from it. I have not made any squares since then.

6 - Caleb had his first piano recital. He did well and looked so dapper in his suit.

7 - We finally got a brand new couch and love seat. I think my mum fell out of her chair when I told her they were brown. (She is HUGE on decorating in brown, and I kind of hate it, but I'm really warming up to certain shades of brown).

8 - Brettley had his second strabismus operation. His eyes are a lot better, but not 100%. I'm trying not to make him do another surgery, since he never fully recovered from the second one.

9 - Ty started Kindergarten and my mornings got a LOT more quiet. His favourite thing to do at school is the house centre.

10 - I finally got a laptop. I got inheritance money from my grandparents and while most of it went to paying off debts, I got to buy one really frivolous thing, so I got a laptop and a wireless trackball mouse. I love em!

My Mum

Can I just say... My mum is a rock star. She is Wonder Woman. She is amazing! I think I was still in shock a bit in my last post when I talked about finding out she'd had cancer. I couldn't get across at the time how it worked in to everything else, but I'd like to do that now. In May 2012 my mum's mom went into a home due to her Alzheimer's and dementia. She wasn't herself anymore and continued to lose who she was from there on. Mum went as often as she could to visit with my grandma and was always thinking of new things she could do to make my grandma as comfortable as possible. Mum is one of the most compassionate and selfless people on the planet. That's just how she is. My mum started getting sick a lot more last year and while doing some tests in her throat area, they found something. She found out that they'd had suspicious results a couple of days before she was called to stay by her mom's side during the last few days of her life. While Mum was struggling with what these results meant for her, she doted upon my grandma and helped her dad and 4 brothers through the whole process. She took care of Grandma until her very last breath, doing everything she could to make Grandma's last days as comfortable and happy as possible. Grandma's battle was finally over, and Mum said goodbye to her mother while taking care of her dad through the process. Not even 6 weeks later Mum found out that there was indeed a mass that was probably cancer. Within days she received word that her dad had passed away. There was family drama going on left and right (horrible drama that I will never recount on here), and Mum had to come to terms with the whole cancer thing at the same time that she was essentially burying both of her parents (we buried both of their urns at the same time). She entered the Christmas season getting more and more sick every day. She had to decide whether or not to tell my brother and I about the results. The decision was to not tell us until after the surgery for very good personal reasons. So while her health was deteriorating and she was mourning her parents, my mum had only her husband for support while preparing for surgery. May I add, she continued working full time through all of this. Weeks before her surgery, at a time when she was always exhausted, barely making it through the days, she was making meals for her friend who lost her daughter at a very young age.

2013 was not kind to my mum. But she pulled through, while still doing everything that she could to continue to help others around her. My mum is one of the most inspirational people that I know of. I am so amazed by how she dealt with everything. She is truly an example of a compassionate, selfless and patient woman. I can only hope that I end up becoming half the woman that she is. I am truly blessed to call her my mum.

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 :)

2014

It's a new year! I am so incredibly relieved to be able to say that. Without going into a lot of detail, 2013 was arguably THE most difficult year of my life. Even the last day of the year was filled with trials (although one of those resulted in me getting a brand new fridge yesterday which I didn't have to pay for, so that was a nice perk).

But, today is a new day and today is a new year, HUZZAH! This year will bring a visit to my Uncle & Aunt's house for spring break, my brother's convocation at the UofL (which I get to travel without kids for), a trip to Magrath for the first time since late winter 2012, Caleb's baptism and me turning 30 (eep!). It's a fresh start and I am excited to see what it will bring to our home. Happy New Year!

I wanted to have a focus theme type thing for this year. Something to sum up what I'd like to get out of the year. I ended up going with 'Go Back to the Basics' and always keeping my 5-5-5-5 rule in mind. For the 'Go Back to the Basics', I want to do as much as I can to keep our lives simplified and to just focus on doing the basic things that we need to be doing (saying our prayers, reading our scriptures, etc) rather than focusing on a bunch of other things that aren't quite as necessary. As for my 5-5-5-5 rule, I'm trying to remember to ask myself if what I'm stressing about will matter 5 days from now...5 weeks from now...5 months from now...5 years from now. I am a very high stress person, and I think if I try to put more perspective into things in the moment that it might make things a bit less stressful for me. So those are my focuses for the year, and I'm very excited for both of them.