Time to start anew

 So after stepping on the scale yesterday and seeing it say 240 I just can't get that out of my head. I have randomly been fighting with swollen ankles and feet for the last few years but it's getting worse. Normally it lasts for a few days but reset each night and I wake up with normal feet and end with swollen ones. Well that has changed. I am now on week 2 of going to bed with both swollen and waking up to just the tops of my feet swollen and feeling like my skin wants to pop from the tension. It's not painful but does bug the mess out of me. 

After a little googling (I know it's not as good as a doctor's opinion) I found that it could be because I have become more sedentary and I'm gaining weight. Now I say this while in the back of my head all I can think about is that my moms feet stay super swollen and so did my grandmas. Now 2 differences between them and me is that 1) I don't eat out all the time at buffets and restaurants maybe 3 times a month and 2) I don't just sit all the time (although I am noticing that increasing). 

So all that to say that I don't feel good at 240, looking in the mirror without baggy clothes on is a no for me, it's time to try to change things. While I don't eat horribly I need to fix how I do eat. I eat rarely and not the best options. time to start looking into fixing that not only for me but also for my family. I do have some apps but am finding they are not my favorite way to track so I think it's time to go old school and use paper and pen. 

I guess this makes today day one and we shall see come March 11 2025 how things stand. I will post an update and hopefully have an overview of how things went. 

Update 1/24/25

 Ok so as of the last post I was planning to take you through my journey with cervical cancer. Well that didn't go as planned. Today I will briefly hit on that journey as well as what all has happened since then up till today, so buckle up and let's dive in.

We all watch these movies which show the people going through treatments and such and still living almost completely normal lives. Well that wasn't the case for me and for some others. Maybe it would have been different had I been the main source of income or a single parent as I would have had no other option but to struggle with that added task. I was very fortunate to have a loving husband that not only supported me through the whole thing but that stayed. 

So the shortened back story is this and I will timeline this for ya...

Jan 2019 I tried a new supplement and within days started randomly bleeding. After about a week I stopped the supplement thinking that was the cause but it wasn't. From the moment the bleeding started til the next point in time I randomly bleed and it normally went like this. Go to the bathroom to pee and bleed, put on panty liner and as soon as I stood it was full, change to pad, take a few steps and it was full, change pad and then just spotting for about an hour then stop. Sometimes once a week and sometimes once or twice a month. No specific time just whenever so I started carrying extra underwear and pads if I left the house and I tried to minimize leaving when I could.

June 2019 This is where it started getting real for me. Roughly mid month followed the normal go to the bathroom routine above but with a scary twist. This time the bleeding didn't stop. I sat there for what felt like forever that night but in reality was just a few minutes but I knew I would need a shower to get clean after that and thankfully our tub was maybe 2 steps from the toilet so kicked off the clothes squeezed those muscles there as tight as I could and got into the tub. Well I felt a little light headed so i squatted down and bam out more came. At this point hubby was getting worried and came to check and when he saw the tub the only comment out of his mouth was "who did you kill, this looks like a crime scene". After that it stopped. I got cleaned up with his help as I was shaking, tired, and pale. I then sat on the bed and made the choice to go to the er. They did some tests, gave me fluids and pain meds, did an internal ultrasound and told me it was probably fibroids. Sent me home with a medicine to stop the bleeding and told me to go see a gyn. It took 2 weeks (June 27th) to get seen and less than 15 minutes to be diagnosed unofficially. We talked to the doctor, decided to do a hysterectomy but he needed to do an exam first since I wasn't a patient there recently. As soon as he touched that area the water works started and he said "I think you have cancer, I need you to go straight to the ER and I am calling a friend in Wilmington who is an oncologist". Well after the nurses help and almost passing out a few times made it to his office to see what the plan was. Hubby took me across the street to er an I had to wait there for transport. June 28th the oncologist took me for a test in the ER and told me I have cancer. I spent the next week in the hospital getting that area packed, starting treatments, getting an embolism to stop the bleeding after almost bleeding to death on the toilet. 

July 2019 I got to go home. This month is easy and will be short because the routine was the same. During this time I had to be taken 1.5 hrs from my home by friends and strangers to get treatment and then brought home to my husband who would help me inside and to bed and had to listen to me wake up at night talking like I was drunk with me remembering nothing about it.

Mondays and Wensdays get up, chemo, radiation, home to bed 

Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays go to radiation and home to bed

Now on chemo days they gave me extra fluids because I developed an issue where if I drank water I would vomit. Doctors had never heard of that so they tested me thinking I was making it up and wanted to see. Well they had the nurses test me and pass info along but they never did anything and I rarely saw the oncologist (which I found out late in treatment was not normal).  It took 52 intense treatments to kill the cancer.

I hardly ate at all and now 5.5 years later I still have issues with plain water and can't stomach yogurt very well. Side effect wise from it all due to how the radiation worked part of my bowel was radiated also so I do have spells of liquid poops that are acidic and hurt (not as bad as during treatment those times i cried) my hair thinned out (thankfully i didn't lose it) and will not get as thick as it was and oddly my teeth are eating away at themselves no matter how i brush them.

Aug 2019 Thankfully I was doing better and got to go to my oldest son's Navy bootcamp graduation which made me happy since I had to watch his highschool one that was televised due to the bleeding issues.

After this things settled down until 2023 when I went back to work so hubby could take a job that paid less because we started noticing some issues there. Nothing major happened until the fall when he quit working and we just adjusted things to live off his VA disability and what I made. We started trying to get him seen to figure out the issues which took a while. We still didn't have answers to what was going on with him but had some concerns. My brother had passed away and so in December my dad mentioned retiring in early 2024 and wanted us to move back and live in the house next door which was my grandmas then my brothers and now is mine.

2024 This was a big year for us in many ways. I worked 5 days a week and would travel right after I got off 2.5 hrs away to help empty our house now during my 2 days off then when back late so i could work. We decided to pull hubby retirement money out so I could quit in March and focus full time on the move. We fixed up our house there to sell and moved everything up here in stages.

May Our daughter an child #2 graduated from early college and then her and her dad moved with the dogs and chickens to our current homestead full time while I stayed finishing up the other house and the boys finished school.

June house went on the market and went under contract in under a week. We moved completely out June 12th and all of the inspections and everything took a while but while things happened there we worked on the new place and took our daughter to her college orientation.

July the house sale completed and we moved on with things here and finally have a neurologist working on the issues my hubby has trying to find the cause.

August dropped our daughter at school, took the boys on a train ride and prepared for the school year jumping through hoops to get them in as things were lost on their end.

November kids are not doing great in school. went from a's and b's to c's and d's some because they were bored waiting to learn something new and my youngest #4 felt the teachers didn't like him. We decided to homeschool using an online program and pulled him just before Thanksgiving and so far he's loving it and back to straight A's. Our other son wanted to stay in school due to wanting to play sports and the potential of a welding class next school year during his senior year since he wants to go into the trades.

Jan 2025 so currently we're just still working on finding out what's wrong with hubby and living life. Due to his issues I did not go back to work and we have learned to just live on his VA disability. I will try to do better keeping up on things and am hoping to accomplish a few things this year. I will list them below and will keep you updated when they get done. Any suggestions on things you want to read or see on videos drop suggestions below.

                                                         GOALS 2025

1) rebuild our garden

2) build new coop for main flock and for old english birds

3) buy 20 birds to replace some of our non layers 

4) get my craft room finished and hoping start back on youtube videos

5) finish organizing the pantry

My journey thru cervical cancer

So as the title explains I will be blogging about this new journey we are going through. I will be posting a week at a time with a little from each day starting in a post or 2.

First I will be giving you all the backstory that leads me to the seat I currently fill. The second post with be filled with the misdiagnosis, correct diagnosis and my first week living with this invader I have named junior.

I know not many will read this nor care and thats ok. Someone may read this and it might help them and that is a great thing, however I have decided to do this for me simply as a way to process and deal with everything that I am going through.

Veggie Straws Vs Great Value Regular wavy chips

Ok so hubby and I had a recent conversation about an article he saw that says veggie straws are just as bad if not worse than regualr chips. He doesn't remember where he saw the article but didn't see any reference to any actual amounts. He looked at me and said "looks like something you can look into for a blog post or a vlog." So lets take a look and see what we can find that might be the same and what might be different between the two. For this comparison we will be looking at Veggie Straws with sea salt with sweet potato added (we got ours from Samsclub) and a bag of Great value original potato chips (the red bag).

So there is the front of the bag. Sorry for the crumpled great value chips the kids had already started eating them prior to me deciding to write this. Ok so here is a picture of the backs so we can see the nutritional information and then we will start comparing them.

Ok so now that you can see everything for yourself so you can see where my information is coming from.

Ok so based on that chart you get more veggie straws per serving, less calories, less total fat, less saturated fat, and less protein than a standard chip. However you are getting more sodium and 1 more gram of carbs than standard chips.

So I 'm not sure which would be worse healthwise. Maybe if you are trying to watch your sodium intake then the Great Value would be a better choice. For me I prefer the veggie straws. While it says they have more sodium they don't taste as salty to me or as greasy.

So one last test lets lay one of each chip on a napkin and see how much grease transfers from chip/straw to napkin after 5 minutes.

Ok so after 5 minutes we can see there is slightly more grease on the right from the standard chip but not much of a difference. Sorry my daughter decided she was going to help and that Poppy needed to help out too.

So after seeing the nutritional info I would still choose to eat veggie straws over regular chips. Which do you prefer? Does this info change your thoughts on which you would choose?

Grocery Store Comparison. Adli vs Food lion

Is it better to drive the 20 minutes across town in the traffic and deal with a bunch of people? Let's see if it is by comparing Adli vs Food Lion's prices on store brand items that compare in size.

                                          vs        

So as I family of six I have to look at where I can get the most for my buck. So here is what I did today. I went to the new Aldi store that opened here and bought some things I needed. Well since they don't carry everything I need I also had to make a stop at Food Lion on the way home. So I priced the same sized items and did store brand vs store brand on everything except the bugels and little sausages since those you can't get store brand anywhere else.

Here is a picture of everything I got today at Aldi. My total today after the $5 coupon from their grand opening with taxes came to $31.15

So lets see how they compare.... Prices below are for single items with exception to the ground turkey. I have to buy 2 of those at Aldi to equal the weight of 1 at Foon Lion so price for it at Aldi is for 2. Also the totals below are without taxes

So by looking at that we can see that by getting these items at Aldi over Food Lion the amount difference was $12.25 in savings. I think that makes it totally worth the drive accross town and dealing with the people for that kind of savings and this was just some things we needed.

2016 coming to an end time to plan for 2017

Well as 2016 is coming to and end it is time to start planning forward to the year to come and all of the new things tha it will bring. This year has been yet another yo-yoing year with the weight loss so it is time to work on changing that.

So a little back story about me. See I have pcos which has several side effects and one of those is making it harder for me to lose weight. I started trying to lose weight in 2012 which was 2 years after our youngest was born and I knew that we were done having kids. Well after 4 kids,  the miscarriages and the etopic pregnancy I had gained just over 100 pounds. When I got married I weighed 145 and after the kids I was at 245. I decided to start losing weight in 2012  and for a while I was doing great. I was doing really great with it.  I did great until I decided to give up smoking when I was down to 175 well after I quit the weight started coming back. Let the yo-yoing begin.

It is hard to lose weight when you get on that scale each Monday and it shows a gain even after working your tail off all week. It is really hard to stay positive and want to keep going. I started to give up and I tried off and on until Feburary 2015 to lose the weight until I got sick. After a brief hospital stay and surgery I came home to recover and I lost it. I lost the desire to work out to keep trying when all it did was lead to failure time and time again. It was easier to just not try.

Well not trying will never get me anywhere. While I have the most supportive husband one can ask for who tells me all the time that he loves me and that he didn't marry me based on my size and that no matter what size I am, how red or acne filled (yes more side effects) my face gets that he will always love me.

While he may be ok and love me as I am I am not ok with it. I don't like how I look and while I am willing to accept that I may never lose a bunch of weight I want to be healthy. I know that pcos can lead to some nasty health issues as life goes on and honestly I don't want my family to have to deal with those. So all of that being said I want to start working on losing some weight or at least making the insides of me healthier if the outsides never change.

So starting in 2017 I want to start working on making me healthier and plan to start easy. I am thinking of starting and ending my day with 25 squats and using potty breaks to do 25 squats each time too. Then because of my weight nothing to crazy just doing simple walking. Time to break ok the walking dvds and just start. Also I am thinking of trying to start following a diet plan that cuts out sugar. Not sure what it is called but that is ok. It is only the 8th so I have over half a month to work on finding recipes and meal plans.

Time to work on getting healthier in 2017. Good luck to everyone who is trying to start the new year to change how they are living and working on making themselves better.

Cheesey ham and hashbrown casserole

This is a quick and easy recipe. I love to make this after having a big ham or just some leftover ham from a previous meal. It is quick and easy and oh so yummy.

Ok so here is everything you need except I forgot to take a picture of the ham, tomatos and seasonings. lol

So here is the easy part you just put the hash browns (still frozen) in the bottom of a casserole dish

Then just open and dump everything else into a bowl and mix it up. Doesn't look good here but it will look better and tastes so good. I do add eggs also. I put 6 eggs but u could do more or less if you choose. I also add a little salt, peper, and garlic powder but again with the seasonings you can do it to your tastes.

Now just dump it all ontop of the potatoes and bake in the oven at 350 degrees for around 30 minutes or until it  is set and warm.

 
Now just dish it up and eat as is or add some salsa and/or sour cream.