It happens, doesn't it? You can be swimming along perfectly fine, and then suddenly a giant wave comes and shoves your head under, completely out of nowhere. One of those hit me yesterday, and as I don't want those waves to take over my life, I'm going to take a cue from other bloggers like Kristen at The Frugal Girl and Katy from The Non-Consumer Advocate and list some good things that are going on. Accentuate the positive and all that. ;)
1. Say hello to my little friend!
Hello, friend!
This is the Winix AW107 FresHome Air Washer with PlasmaWave Technology. A lady from a local mom's group offered this up for free today. She's moving and this, along with a bunch of other stuff, was free. I had just been thinking about finding something like this; our basement (or more accurately, our crawlspace), tends to smell a little musty in the winter. What are the odds of this showing up two days later? But there it was, and now here it is in my house, and I'm pretty excited about it. One of the reviews says it worked great for their musty basement, so I'm absolutely willing to give it a shot, especially at the insanely amazing price of FREE.
2. My new physical therapist is amazing.
I went back for my second appointment yesterday and it was a seriously intense session. Intense in a good way, but I think it also added to my funk today.
Let me backtrack a little. Have you ever heard of people getting emotional during deep tissue massages? Like, the person doing the massaging will be doing their thing, just massaging along, and then suddenly the person on the table is in tears and doesn't understand why? I know that's a thing, I've read about it, but I've never experienced it until yesterday.
I have degenerative disc disease, along with some dimished disc space, and possibly some other stuff going on. I live with daily pain; it's just a fact of life at this point and I do my best not to let it stop me. But it's always there, and my muscles really fight to keep up with what my skeleton and associated bits of my back aren't doing. My new PT is really good at finding all the sore spots, and yesterday, she found my quadratus lumborum muscle, or the QL, as she called it. It apparently causes problems for a lot of people, but holy crap... My general response to pain is to laugh and crack jokes; it's always been my coping mechanism, but when she basically jammed her elbow into my right side QL and just rested on it to get it to release, I had to seriously focus and go inward to get through it. This was so far the roughest PT session I've had. I left feeling exhausted, and became more emotional throughout the night, and I've stayed that way throughout today (although I'm actually feeling a little better as I type this out). Although I'm pretty sore today, it's kind of like a post-workout soreness and not in a "My body is failing me!" kind of pain, and my regular daily pain is much less, so this is a really good thing. This is absolutely what I need, and as I've been in this current back pain flare-up for the past year and a half, you better believe I'll be absolutely throwing myself at my PT again on Thursday (my next scheduled appointment).
Have you ever experienced anything like this before? I'm curious to hear others' stories.
3. I'm so thankful for my mom.
My mom lives about 45 minutes away, but she comes up every PT session and stays with my daughter so that I can go. She knows how much I struggle with back pain and is so happy to help out. She's always so generous with her time, her money, her energy, and I could not be more fortunate to have a mom like her.
4. I love my dishwasher.
When we first moved into our current home, I had the following:
* an eight month old daughter who woke me up 4-6 times a night.
*no microwave
*no clothes dryer
*no dishwasher
*no sanity
Every night after dinner, I trudged downstairs to wash a load of laundry, pull down the laundry I'd dried the night before on our drying racks, put that load of laundry away, then hang the first load on the racks when it finished washing. With three people in adult-sized clothing and a baby who thought that bowls of soup made for fashionable hats, we generated a lot of laundry, and while in normal circumstances I love air drying clothing, when you haven't slept more than three hours straight for the past ten months, more work doesn't exactly rank high on the list. We finally got a dryer five months after moving in.
Same with the microwave. One can live without a microwave, but when you're exhausted and your child is the type who will scream for an hour because you won't let her stick her fingers in a socket while you're trying to heat up lunch on the stove and you eat leftovers every day for lunch, well, it makes a difference. We finally got a microwave when my sister in law was over and wanted to reheat her son's food and was like, "..." My husband brought home one the next day.
Now. The dishwasher. My husband ran out and bought one on sale a few weeks after we moved into the house. Cool. Awesome. I was excited, because I'd already spent far too long washing dishes.
He installed it a year and a half later.
Oh yes, you read that right.
For a year and a half, on so very, very little sleep and a kid who constantly had to be stopped from climbing the walls every three seconds, I sometimes washed three sinks full of dishes per day (because I cook almost everything we eat). Between that and the wet laundry I hung, my hands were chapped to the point of painfulness that first winter. Washing dishes is my LEAST favorite chore EVER.
Things I would rather do than wash dishes:
*mow the lawn
*clean the toilet
*scoop the cat box
*clean up someone else's vomit (I am 100% serious here. That's how much I hate dishes.)
It took my husband all of an hour to install the dishwasher. One single hour, after how many loads of dishes I'd scrubbed (sometimes not very comfortably, because again, back problems and chronic pain). But that's all done now, and I adore that dishwasher. It's been installed for a little over a year now and I don't think I'll ever stop feeling grateful for it. It's a little on the loud side, but it could play heavy metal at top volume and I'd still sing its praises. I'm listening to it run now as I type, and it's just about the most beautiful sound I've ever heard. :)
5. I'm enjoying this lovely blended coffee drink.
Ahhhh.
Made at home from a mix I bought at Sam's Club a year or so ago, along with some frozen cubes of leftover coffee that I didn't want to go to waste. I don't drink these often, since it's more sugar than I normally like, but some days, you just need a treat, right? :)
What good things are going on for you today?
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*post contains affiliate links
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