Back to Normal and Pictures!

Hello everyone!  I'm back from the beach and have spent the last week trying to get back to normal.  Don't you hate coming back from vacation?  One of these years I'm just going to spend the whole summer at the beach, wouldn't that be nice?   So anyway, we had a great time but this years vacation was a little different because we decided to take my parents with us.  This meant taking three cars.  My husband drove my dad down in our pickup truck with most of our beach gear, coolers and bikes tied on the back - Beverly Hillbillys style(remember that show?) I drove my mother and three boys and the puppy in the van, and my oldest son drove his girlfriend down in his car and also had our older dog.  He and his girlfriend had to leave three days early so they needed their own car.
What I discovered this trip is that something is definitely wrong with my mother.  She has always had a bit of an irritable streak in her but this trip she seemed irritated at EVERYTHING, especially my father.  He couldn't even say good morning without her going off on him.  It made it a bit uncomfortable for the rest of us.  My dad seems to think it's the blood pressure pills the doctor put her on and thinks if she went off those and exercised she would be back to her old self.  I think there is something else going on.  Maybe her thyroid or may some kind of kidney problem or something.  Her other symptoms are:  always freezing, loss of most of her muscle mass, balance problems if she walked too far, and an over all sort of unhappiness.   The doctor she went to see back home only did blood work which pointed to high potassium and nothing else.  I think she needs to get a more thorough checkup but both her and my father have a distaste for doctors ("they don't know what they are doing" "they just run tests to run the bill up"" they want to put you on all sorts of pills that cause even more problems" etc.)   My dad is having a cataract procedure in the next couple of weeks, so after he is done with that I may try to go to thier house and talk my mom into seeing a different doctor.  Not looking forward to that.

 So anyway..... even though my mother put a bit of a damper on the trip we still had a wonderful time on the beach.  I'm putting up a few pictures of our time there even though I'm one of those people that doesn't really like my own photos!

So here is our setup up everyday. That's me waving, my husband is next to me, my brother and my sister-in-law that likes to make fun of our "no sugar" lifestyle

My dad and I down by the water

The boys and I took the dogs on an evening walk on the beach, trying to see if Mabel would like the water

 

Mabel was all "there is no way I'm getting in that water!"

I love my boys!

My parents and I walking thru the seaside town of Manteo on Roanoke Island.  My mom only made it a couple streets and then we sat. She is only 73 years old for goodness sake and my dad is 77.

This is Jockey's Ridge State Park.  The tallest natural sand dune system in the Eastern United States. The big thing everyone does here is to climb on the higher dunes and then run down.

Here is my youngest, Kyle, showing you how it's done! (at the top of the pic you can see everyone's legs that are waiting for their turn to run down!)

To give you an idea of how vast the dunes are at Jockey's Ridge.

From the dunes you can see the ocean.  The Outer Banks start as just a thin Peninsula and then turns into a series of Islands.

Sunset at Jockey's Ridge

When we got home I found this on the outer banks Facebook page.  This is not a tornado it's a water spout that formed right down the beach from where we were staying.  My middle son Nick who is studying Environmental Science was so disappointed to not be there to see it.  It happened the day after we left.  Cool!

So that was our vacation in a nutshell.

On the diet news.  I think I stayed pretty true to our way of eating. I did have a couple beers or a couple glasses of wine EVERYDAY when we got back from the beach and before dinner  (My mother remember?) .  I think I helped out with a bowl of chips and salsa one night, but other than those two things I stuck with my diet. I was up a pound when I got back, but two days later I was back to 159lbs.  I'm so used to eating this way now that there isn't much I crave, except those darn salsa and chips every now and then.  I'm going to push to get the last ten pounds off now that we're back.  I still have  some belly weight to get off.  Don't think I'll ever get it ALL off like the old days but hopefully I can still get down a little further.  I'll get back into the blogs this week and see how all of you are doing.  Hopefully everyone is doing great and having a wonderful summer!!