Day 24: New and Improved

The look of the blog has changed a little bit and there is a reason for that!  I added 2 new pages to this blog for your reading pleasure. 

1st I added a recipe page called Eat It! where I will list recipes that I use for my weight loss plan.  You can find it under the Quantum Leap Frog banner at the top of the page.  I have 2 recipes on there now and a few more that I want to put up.  My recipes tend to be a little off the wall because I follow the beat of a slightly different dieting drummer.  I am sensitive to wheat and gluten so I am always looking for alternatives to flour.  I'm lactose intolerant so whey protein leaves me doubled over in pain and I simply won't do soy protein because I, personally, believe it is bad for the thyroid in large quantities.  I use alternatives for those too.  So if you would like to try some of the recipes on my blog and can't find the ingredients in your local super market I have created an Amazon store with a lot of harder to find ingredients already found for you.  The Amazon store has 2 categories:  Reading & Audio (it contains the media I am using along the way towards a new and improved Sara) and a Pantry (food items).  The Amazon store is the reason the blog now looks different.  I had to reconfigure the layout to give the store the space necessary to function properly. 

The store and recipe pages will be updated pretty regularly so make sure to check in on them from time to time.  You never know when you'll find something you like.  I used the Amazon store on another blog I follow and I was really impressed with how it functioned, so imagine my excitement to realize I could make my own on this blog!  It's pretty cool.

Now back to the reason we're all here:

Today I tried to get back into some kind of groove.  I needed to get Kenny back into school work (we'd taken a few days off), get myself back onto a better eating track and try to just get some things done.  I have yet to get done all of the items on my self-imposed Quantum Leap work list in 1 day.  I usually get the blog and the gallon of water in, sometimes the reading but other things just come up or I just shut down and need to veg out to let my brain unwrap itself from the knot it gets into around my brain stem.  Today I did manage to get a fantastic beef stew on the stove, drank my water, tried to multi-task but alas, my hitch sputtered out of my giddy up before the daylight did.  Making sure Kenny gets all his meds in at appropriate times interrupts my thoughts and I have been sitting up late at night listening to him breath in his sleep to make sure the cooler night air isn't making his chest tighten up.  I hate it when he's sick.  I'd rather be sick myself than hear him not be able to breath properly.  I had the Swine Flu last year so I know how it feels to not be able to breath without wheezing.

Kenny, however, thinks it's pretty cool to have a medical apparatus.  He can't wait to show it to his cousin who is diabetic and needs to carry supplies with him where ever he goes.  Hopefully the novelty will wear off and he will prefer to be healthy again.  I'm not a huge fan of General Medicine and not one to immediately lean on the medical industry unless I have to so I am not as enamoured with his antibiotics and inhaler as he is.  I have to keep Motrin on hand for the headaches he gets after using the inhaler and Benedryl in case he starts getting hives from the antibiotic.  He's allergic to certain types.   So right now he's pumped full of a variety of different chemicals and medicines and that makes me nervous.  The human body is too delicately balanced to be bombarded haphazardly with this and that the other thing the doctor adds to the list.  I think part of the reason we are all so sick and out of balance is because there is so much 'stuff' in our environment building up in our bodies and compounding into general maladies and eventually larger issues.  It's a little scary!  Did I mention he got 4 booster shots at his physical, too?  I am not sure on which side of the fence I stand on the Inoculation Debate.  I don't know who to believe about the nature of the medicines, how they are processed and what problems they can actually cause.  I've read the literature but there isn't conclusive evidence one way or the other that satisfies the nervous mommy in me. 

I sometimes wish there was a parenting manual that got sent home with you from the hospital...but then again it would probably have been published by corporate entity owned collectively by Monsanto, BP and drug manufacturers.  Who's to say the information wouldn't have been a very long print ad for their methods and products?

Speaking of Big Business, here's something interesting I learned from my Organic Gardening magazine.  Don't use recycled tires as planters....not even if you think you are being green.  And don't use shredded rubber from tires around your playground areas or near your garden.  Why?  Because as the sun and weather slowly wears away at the material, heavy metals used in the tired production process are leeched into the ground, into your soil and eventually into the ground water supply.  Nice, huh?  It pays to be informed. 

Until tomorrow, my friends...have a Happy Saturday!

Sara Smile