It’s funny:  No matter how detailed a blog is, and no matter how descriptive and honest and frequent the posts, they really are such a small indication of anyone’s real life.

One can have significant life events, but if one doesn’t blog about it, to readers, it’s as if it never happened.  I find this strange.

For instance, nearly two weeks ago, I took a daytrip with another homeschooling mom.  She and her two boys, and myself and my four children piled into my often-useful Land Barge and drove up to Sedona.  The reason?  To see Fall happening.  Living in the desert, there’s not much Fall going on, especially since we’ve had 20+ straight days of above-average and record heat.  It’s NOT supposed to be 90 degrees in November.  Unless you’re in Austrailia.  So, we took a lovely hike along the banks of a creek, marvelling at the yellow-leaved sycamores, red-leaved maples, and now-brown-leaved oaks.  We just don’t get “Fall color” here in the Phoenix area, and must travel out of town to observe.  I’m still hoping to get pics and an actual blog post up, soon.  

In other events, I have been VERY ill the last few days.  To spare all of you the needless, grotesque mental pictures, I won’t go into it, other than calling it “flu-like” symptoms.  It’s always a bummer when The Mom gets sick.  Thankfully, it lasted for about 48 hours, and strangely enough, it happened on a Sunday — which is not a workday, and on a Monday — which my husband had already planned to take the day off.  What’s particularly sad about this, though, is that the reason he’d planned on taking Monday off is because it was our 13th wedding anniversary.  He’d also planned on taking me out to a fancy dinner on Sunday night.  He’d already procured the babysitter, and already called the restaurant and confirmed that the chef was very familiar with preparing gluten-free meals.  And, for Monday, he had a family outing planned:  a drive and a hike in Flagstaff, which I thought was a fantastic plan.  He’d printed out descriptive pages of each event, and put them in envelopes for me to open and discover what was next on his agenda.  And, all of that was lost, due to my dumb illness.

What I think was particularly odd, too, about me getting “that kind” of sick is that just the day before it hit, I had decided, “When I finally wean Audrey, I’m going to fast for three days.”  When one is pregnant and then nursing, it’s simply unwise, for both personal health, and for the health of the wee one, to fast.  I’m not a super-regular faster, but when not pregnant or nursing, I do fast, both for the focused spiritual aspect of it, for simple obedience to Scripture, and for the health benefits of the total cleansing that happens when one is ingesting only water.

So, being sick, I didn’t quite do a total fast.  But for about 24 hours I lived on Gatorade and Vitamin Water… Even with the non-water drinks, a lot of unintentional cleansing took place.

I’ve decided that if I do choose to do a “real” fast, I’m going to have to stay loaded up on calcium.  I have to be diligent about supplementing calcium, even on a ”non-sick” basis.  This is because of two things:  1) I’m dairy-free, and 2) one of the symptoms of my celiac disease was that I was not properly absorbing calcium, which led to bone-density problems.  Even though I’ve been gluten-free for five years, my body still seems to need a larger-than-average daily intake of calcium.  If I’m not careful, my body starts sucking calcium out of my body’s largest bones:  the femur and my pelvis.  This leads to deep, painful bone ache.  On day two of illness, the bone pain was excruciating.  I had to take some extra-strength Tylenol to let me sleep.  I am against medicating to simply dull the pain of something that can be otherwise alleviated — in this case, just taking more calcium.  But, I was swilling bone meal toddies several times a day with no relief — relief comes usually 24-48 hours later.  It’s just now starting to feel better, after nearly 2 days hopped up on Tylenol.

Hm.  This wasn’t a very interesting post, I don’t think.  But, it’s time to get back to school, so I guess I’ll just click “Publish.”       

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