My health: Is good! I feel great. I was told that adjusting to the synthetic thyroid hormones would be a bit of a rollercoaster ride, but it hasn't been at all. The first couple of weeks, I could tell my body was adjusting to them, but after that I have felt just fine. Just like normal. My voice is back to normal too. The only issue that remains is that my scar is still attached to the muscles in my neck. Most of the time I don't notice it, but sometimes it is uncomfortable. After the summer is over, I'll go back in and they will basically cut out my scar. So they will remove the part that is attached to the muscle. That should solve the problem. That is just an office procedure with local anesthetic. Doesn't sound like much fun, but at least it's not another hospital stay.
RAGBRAI: is less than a month away! Wow! We are really getting ready. This last weekend we went camping with the kids to "practice" camping. We will be sleeping in a tent that whole week. The kids had slept in a tent before, but only in our backyard. So last weekend we went camping for two nights and the kids did great! That had a wonderful time and slept well in the tent. We were able to make lists of everything we would need for RAGBRAI. Actually living out of the car helped us realize what we'd forgotten that we would need and how to organize it better.
Camping: The camping trip I mentioned above was at Pine Lake. That's near Eldora, IA for those of you who know Iowa. It's about an hour from our house. We chose it simply because they had available spots to reserve when we finally got around to reserving a spot late last week. We had to choose a campsite on the internet and just guessed at which one we would like, and we loved it! It was a nice wooded site. It had been raining on Friday before we went, so it was a little muddy, but not too bad. All Billy wanted to do was ride his tricycle around practically the whole time. He got very muddy! We all brought our bikes, but we only rode them in a small loop around the campground with the kids. Julia is working on getting more confident on her two wheeler with training wheels. She is very tentative and nervous about going fast. But she got better this weekend. We also went on a short hike to the lake, and went swimming at a nearby beach. But I think the highlight for everyone was making smores over the campfire each night. That was definitely Julia's favorite part. The first night I stupidly grabbed Julia's stick the she was roasting a hot dog on by the metal part that was still hot, and got a pretty bad but small burn on my hand. Luckily it was not bad enough to ruin the trip.
Our crazy schedule: Since Julia's preschool ended, we have been very busy. We've been to the zoo, dentist appointments, a once a week preschool class for the kids, a once a week sports class for all four of us to help the kids learn how to better throw, catch, hit, and kick a ball, a big indoor playground for Julia's birthday, Julia's castle themed birthday party, a 5k run (my first in 6 years - ouch!), and I took a quick trip to California (more on that below), then the camping trip, and this week my brother and his family come to visit, next week we head to Wisconsin for Dan's family reunion, then we have a couple of weeks to prepare for RAGBRAI and we're off. Whew! I'm looking forward to the two weeks in August when we don't have anything planned (at the moment)
My business: Okay, this is a super long post, but if you've read this far, there's only one more piece of news that many of you may already know about. I started a small home based business this month. So along with all the other things we've been doing, I'm trying to get this going too. I am a home sales consultant for the MicrodermaMitt. It is an all natural exfoliating mitt that leaves your skin feeling and looking smoother, softer, and younger. I never thought I'd do anything like this, but I love this product and everyone else seems to love it once they try it too. If you want more info about it, send me an email and I'll give you more details. This product is what ironically took me back to Redlands, the town I grew up in, for some more training. Strangely, a good friend of mine from college moved to Redlands a couple years ago and lives on the same street I grew up on. She is the one who discovered the MicrodermaMitt and got me involved. So I went to visit her to learn more about the mitt and how to sell it. It was a quick but fun trip and I got to see some old friends from school and some family as well.
