Sodium & Hearing Loss?

Hubby's ear has been bothering him for a while. He was finally able to see an ENT last week who explained to him that he basically has Meniere's Disease. Nothing too horrible. As the doc said, "It's a $5 disease with a $10 name." The gist of the conversation? If you want your hearing back you're going to have to go on a very low sodium diet and keep it that way.

WOW!

What a shock! Sodium & hearing loss? Seriously?

Apparently So.

And so the journey begins. A low sodium diet.

Do you have ANY idea how hard this really is? Seriously. Go take a peek in your pantry and you'll DIE when you realize how much sodium is in all this processed food, especially in relation to what we should be consuming. The removal of salt from cooking and at the table doesn't go far enough to get someone onto a low sodium diet. You know what that means? I get to learn to cook from scratch. I don't mean partly from scratch, I mean TOTALLY from scratch.

My first meal, from scratch? Spaghetti. We can use store bought noodles but can't go near the spaghetti sauces in a jar or can. I started with 15 Roma tomatoes and it really was pretty good.

I have lost 7 pounds since we started this on Sunday. Hubby has lost at least 6. We are consuming more fresh fruits & veggies than ever before and we're not over eating.

We're planning on purchasing a salt-free salt flavored replacement this weekend. Hopefully that will at least put some flavor back in our food, lol. So far, so good. But truly crazy.

Christmas

This Christmas is going to be filled with lots of great things. For the first time Little Man grasps the concept (that we know of) of Santa and he's SO excited about it. When you ask him if Santa is at the North Pole, he says, "No he's at the store." LOL. Peanut is going to enjoy going into destruction mode and ripping open gifts. We don't call him destruct-o baby for nothin'!

There are also going to be some truly sad moments. Well it's the lack of moments that will be sad. I think sad is the appropriate adjective anyway. I've been working diligently on a project for someone special that may never see it and that SUCKS. Unfortunately my children (really just Little Man) don't understand it and I hate the toll it takes on them.

But mostly this holiday is going to be filled with lots of great times and we'll have lots of memories to create. I'm so excited to see the boys faces on Christmas morning!

Our Little Snowflake

This week Little Man's school had their Christmas Program. This one was the PK-1 children and it was cute. "Santa has Amnesia" was the title. The preschoolers were snowflakes & sang a song called, "The Snow is Falling Today" followed by using their 'drums' to another song. Again, SO CUTE. :)

Baby It's Cold Outside...

Brrrrr.....

I forgot how much I do not like the cold. It just makes everything hurt. I can barely use my hands when it's this cold outside.

It's 8:30 in the morning and it's all of 23 degrees outside. That's just ridiculous and insane for here. So of course everything outside is ice. It's hard to tell in this picture but it's ice.

Snow? Not so much.

This is southeast Texas. It doesn't snow here. And when it does it's the tiniest flurries that you struggle to see in the air. Not this year. Or last year.

Actually, last year it snowed and it tied for the earliest snowfall ever here. However, we were at the hospital with Peanut and completely missed it. Little Man got to play in it with Diva but doesn't remember it.

So anyways, onto 2009. It's snowing. It started snowing here shortly before 8am and nothing is sticking. By the time all is said and done some areas (about 45 min south of us) got as much as 4 inches of the white stuff and they have enough to make nice sized snowmen! We were jipped. But the boys didn't mind. They liked playing in the stuff falling from the sky and didn't know they were missing white stuff on the ground, lol. Little Man has no recollection of us living in Michigan.

Enjoy.