Fibromyalgia

I have fibromyalgia. I'm learning to deal with it and know my limitations. In addition to my fibromyalgia I have osteoarthritis throughout my body...it's becoming obvious in more and more locations. :-)

I go see my rheumatologist regularly for bloodwork and xrays to keep a check on things. I've also signed up with Quality Health...
There is a ton of useful information on this website. They email me articles all about diet help, exercise tips, emotional needs etc pertaining to my fibromyalgia and arthritis. I also regularly receive samples from Quality Health - an extra bonus!

FYI for those with Diabetes
Even though I don't suffer from Diabetic Nerve Pain there is a special offer available for those of you who do if you sign up to receive emails from Quality Health right now.

Expensive is not always better

My sweet husband has taken to bringing me flowers a lot lately. I LOVE THIS! I absolutely love flowers...really colorful varities...not just roses. He knows that and he purchases different kinds to surprise me. Here's a few of the bouquets he has given me over the last few weeks...

This is a bouquet when I first got it (the flowers aren't opened up yet)

The flowers are starting to open up..

The roses opening up...

He gets all these flowers from Publix. They really have great prices on their flowers. I shop in Publix and do some merchandising work in Publix every week so I know how much he pays for my flowers and I'm really pleased with how long my flowers last and how beautiful they are...and he's not paying a fortune for them. (I've grown particularly fond of their Lilies!)

Last Saturday he decided to surprise me and have 2 bouquets of flowers delivered to me from Flowerama. That was expensive! I've been very disappointed with how quickly these flowers have wilted too. They didn't even last 4 days before they started wilting!

He gave me this bouquet from Publix a few days before the flowers from Flowerama. I just took these pictures this morning. Look at how beautiful the Publix flowers still are!! They are over a week old......

These are my Flowerama roses/lilies I received last Saturday afternoon....

Another bouquet from Flowerama received last Saturday afternoon....


Isn't that pitiful?!? I'll take "inexpensive" Publix flowers over those outrageous Flowerama flowers anyday! Thanks honey bunny!!

Summer Learning

I've always homeschooled Dakota. For the most part he is where he needs to be "compared" to kids his age except for his math skills. He struggles with that and I struggle with how to teach it to him. I've been considering putting him in a summer program to jump start those math skills...I know he'll hate it but he'll thank me for it later. :-)

What about ya'll? Have any of you readers put your kids in any summer math programs before? What did you think?

Toon-ful Tuesday

Who doesn't love kitchen appliances??

Image via Wikipedia

Are you one of those people who loves gadgets and gizmos for your kitchen? I have to be very careful about what I purchase to use in my own kitchen only because I don't have the space to store all the things I would like to buy. Shopwiki is a terrific website to help when you are looking for kitchen appliances.

Most search websites will only show you sales from stores that have paid to put their ads on that particular website. Shopwiki crawls the entire web to show you everything!

Recently I was in the need for a blender. This is no simple task for me. When I want to purchase something like this, I read consumer reviews and compare prices at as many stores as I can so I can get the best price possible. Shopwiki was an excellent source to turn to because they gave me a ton of information, Good Housekeeping recommendations and then all the prices they could find on whichever appliance I was interested in.

I ended up choosing a blender which has a food processor attachment (since I didn't have one of those yet either) and I have used both pieces and been extremely happy with both!

DoDoMan

Meet DoDoMan...



He looks vaguely similar to my son Dakota doesn't he (underneath all that hair anyway)!?

Last week when my 2-yr-old granddaughter, Bailee, was staying with me we were attending Vacation Bible School every evening at church. Our VBS starts on Sunday nights and runs through Thursdays with the commencement on Friday. The youth have a choice of helping at VBS or going off-site to somebody's house to swim, eat and have a Bible study of their own. Dakota stayed at church to help on Sunday and went off-site the rest of the week.

When the activities were over Sunday evening I picked Bailee up from her classroom and took her into the closing ceremony. She loved going in there every evening and dancing and watching the kids sing and dance.
After it was over I told her we needed to go find "Kotaman" - I am in the habit of calling Dakota -- "Kotaman."

He was in another building helping the teachers set up for the next night. When we walked in and saw him in there Bailee said in her very loud voice "Dere he is! DoDoMan!!"

Due to the laughter and cute reaction she received from calling him that, she has now decided that is his permanent name.

Nudge, Nudge

For anybody familiar with twitter (you can follow me here) you know that you can "nudge" somebody when they haven't posted any updates in awhile. My daughter - the one living in Hawaii - did that the other day. She nudged me via cell phone and said "okay woman, I want updates on your blog! It's been over a week and nothing!"

So here goes, a quick run-down of what's going on in my life (and keeping me from blogging lately)...

I planned a Surpise Birthday Party for a very special friend two Saturday's ago. I've talked about her on my blog before. She and her family are really going through some trying times right now. They need lots of prayer and I would appreciate it if you would keep them in your prayers. Their last name is Carter. One of their 13-yr-old daughters (she's a twin) is a cancer survivor, but she requires lots of follow-up treatments and has needed several surgeries and things to repair problems from the chemo, etc. In the last two months they've discovered the father possibly has cancer (it's not looking very good) - they are sending him to Houston for more tests on June 15th. Melissa, the mother just had surgery to repair some problems (probably too personal for me to put on here) and she is home recovering from her surgery right now...and still having some complications. She celebrated her 29th birthday a day or two before her surgery and with everything her precious family has been dealing with lately I just wanted to do something special for her.

Here she is realizing everybody is there at the restaurant for HER - she thought it was only going to be three of us, not a whole group. We had a great evening!


Dakota is playing flag football on Saturdays. He has practice on Thursday nights. This has been something completely new to us...football that is, but he is really enjoying playing.

Tina and Bryant came into town last weekend and we spent time with them...
(Greg is tickling Bailee)

I now have Bailee (as of yesterday) for one week so she can go to Vacation Bible School at church this week with me. So far she is doing great being away from mommydaddy - as she calls her parents. She's napping right now so I'm taking advantage of the time to blog!

We've been going to the beach a lot! The weather has been beautiful and the fishing has been great!




I've been working away from my house...the merchandising work I started doing awhile back has picked up and is keeping me busy. This past week alone I had over 20 stores to do (I didn't get them all done...oops! so now I'm scrambling finding a babysitter for Tuesday so I can finish by Tuesday.)

In the midst of ALL of that we have been upgrading things in our home so we've been shopping shopping shopping like crazy and I can finally say I am sick of bargain shopping! I'm so tired of running from store to store and website to website looking and comparing styles, models, prices...ugh - just go get what you want and be done with it!

We are still looking for a shed for our back yard but we just haven't settled on a price we are both happy with. I'm so tired of looking for it though.

Anyway, that's a small glimpse of my life the last couple of weeks. Hopefully things will slow down here soon and I can catch up on all my bloggy friends' lives too. Hope life is treating you well!