Catching up....

I fell on the ice on Saturday night. Right on my tailbone. It hurts! It messed up my lower back a little too. Hey, as long as I don't have to bend, cough, sneeze, strain,sit up, sit down, etc I feel great! ha ha Nephi has a lot of experience with back problems so he uses his therapy skills to at least try to re-align my back. He can tell that my SI joints (huh?) are out of whack by the fact that one leg is just a little shorter than the other. Then he does a bunch of different things that evens them back out. I have to say, it is comforting living with a therapist.

The worst part of this is that I just started Body for Life (strength building, weight loss program) a week ago and I have been working so hard! Now I feel a little crippled. It's going to be a challenge to keep it up while I heal. But I don't want to waste the last week so I'm going to plug along and do what I can.

Not a lot going on here. Weathers on and off. We got dumped on like most everyone. Tonight we expect more snow and then it should be good again. I've been shoveling the driveway for my older neighbors. He just had shoulder surgery. I know they're probably counting on me for this storm coming and I'm worried because I can barely pick up something in my house, let alone shovel my own driveway. What am I going to do??? I don't want to let them down. I'm hoping for a miracle.

My birthday is this weekend. I'll be 32 years old. WHAT?! I hope I don't look that old. That seems old to me. I still want to be 29. That was the perfect age. I was reading something on Yahoo news. It was a dermatology article written by a dermatologist of course. She was listing the 10 biggest mistakes people use. Well, I can't remember most of them. But I do remember that one of them was "Not using sunscreen", and "Not using a retinol". These tips are of course related to maintaining younger looking skin. So the first one's easy. Just get a daytime moisurizer with sunscreen. At Wal Mart I found a moisturizer with spf 30 for $13. That was easy. Now, the retinol. Apparently that not only makes your skin clear but it is super effecitive at avoiding and reducing facial lines. She recommended getting a prescription retinol if possible since it is hightly potent. (Not doing that.) Or getting a brand like ROC or another one that contains the retinol. ROC looks like a fairly affordable brand that I can just buy OTC. So something like that should be the night cream. SPF by day, retinol by night. Seems easy enough.

Next topic.
So I've been making a real effort to improve the quality of the foods that we eat at home. In a perfect world we'd go all organic but that is impossible. The prices on organic food can be so expensive so I'm making changes where I can.
I would love to buy organic meat because there are so many issues with meat that I don't even want to think about. But it's not possible. Organic meat is outrageously expensive. So we could become vegetarians. Not going to happen. Sorry poor cow, I like my beef.
Okay, so one step at a time. I decided to switch to organic milk and organic, cage free eggs. The organic milk is sold in 1/2 gallon cartons. Pretty expensive but there's only four in our family so it's doable. One carton is more than a gallon of reg milk. The eggs are more too but it makes me happy that the chickens that produced our eggs weren't miserable slaves. And they were fed an all vegetarian diet. So those were two changes I could make.
I've also committed to only organic apples. According to experts, apples contain the highest levels of pesticides. Even washing them doesn't fix it. I've found that organic apples are not a lot more money than regular ones. Easy change. Organic carrots are also easy and pretty affordable to find. Organic spinach is another easy and fairly affordable change.

Baby steps. I feel that as many chemicals and negative by-products I can take out of our family's diet over the years is that much less that our bodies will have to contend with. Hopefully it will protect our health to some degree over the long term.