The holidays and family

I hope everyone had a wonderful Holiday. Can't believe that we are in 2020 already! 2019 flew by so fast!! My holidays were good except for one thing, my aunt passed away on December 22nd. She will be greatly missed!!

She is now with my mom, grandparents, and aunt. I love how close our family is, when my aunt went into the hospital, we all kept in contact through Facebook, and it was amazing to see all the messages. From making sure she was warm enough, to making sure the family knew what was going on, and who was going to visit her. I unfortunately did not get the chance to see her. With her feeling better the Saturday I thought I would have time to head down on Monday and go straight to the hospital to see her, but unfortunately on the Sunday she passed away. The family took it really hard, and she will be greatly missed. She was one amazing and caring aunt.

We spent a week in Sudbury, and it was nice spending that time with family. This past week we have been at home enjoying our second week of vacation. I had a few physio appointments, hubby had to go for allergy shots, we went to visit his mom, and I took some time to de-clutter, clean, tidy up,  spend a bit of time in the kitchen, and made sure to take time to rest up as well.

I have been going to physio because I thought I had tennis elbow. My left elbow hurts to bent and extend. I have been doing some stretches, wearing a band, and trying to rest it up as well and it wasn't getting any better so my doctor recommended I go to physio. She doesn't think it's tennis elbow, she believes the source starts at my neck, cause I'm really tense there, and I have more tense muscles down my arm to my elbow. She's working on massaging and doing acupuncture in those areas to help. During the week in Sudbury it actually did get better, but now it's about the same again. I think I need to work on spending less time on my tablet and phone. I think the looking down and holding them is what isn't helping. If I am on my tablet or phone I try to keep it eye level, and try to rest my tablet on something so I'm not holding it with my left arm since I need my right hand to click. Hopefully with more time and appointments, it will get better.

While I was in Sudbury, my cousin and I did our ritual, which is hit Chapters. We both love that place! We love books and it's my zen place. I saw the new Joyous Health cookbook was out so I had to get it!

I put it in my recipe book holder cause I tried the very fist recipe in her book, the Applesauce spice breakfast muffins, and they turned out amazing!

The recipe says it makes 6 muffins but as you can see I filled them quite a bit and I still had a lot more batter left, so I made 8 muffins. The second photo is them all baked. We took a bite of one to try it and it's delicious!! They will make a great breakfast/snack for the week. We are off tomorrow as well, but we have a few errands to run, and then Tuesday we are back to work, so these will be great.

I also made the jambalaya, which instead of a mix of meats, I only put spicy sausage. It's one of our favorites, and I also bought a whole chicken to cook in the oven. I added spices to the chicken, and we had a nice salad with it. With the bones, I made a broth the following day and used that broth to make soup. I added some of the left over chicken as well to the soup. It's not the healthiest soup but I love making it once a year. It reminds me of my mom, and it always turns out delicious. We have more left over food to enjoy this coming week, but then the following week, I want to do a Joyous Health diet. It's not a diet, but it is about eating healthy, and I need that right now. Every recipe I have tried, is so delicious! I just got her third cookbook, which the first two I was able to get her to sign them for me, so I hope to get this one autographed as well. So with 3 cookbooks, and all the recipes she has online on her blog, will allow us to eat healthy for a long time. I often make the same recipes, or same sort of meals/snacks, so with trying out more of her recipes it will allow us to eat healthy and try new meals and snacks instead of eating the same things all the time. I'm excited to get started!

Over the holidays, I have been eating a lot of meat, and dairy, so it's one thing I will avoid for a while. Joy has a variety of recipes, from vegetarian, gluten free, dairy free but also some with meat. For those I can either omit the meat to make it vegetarian, or I can add seafood or tempeh instead. I'm surprised I haven't really had any endometriosis pain with all the meat and dairy I have been eating, but I don't want to get to that point of getting pain so it will be good for me to avoid meats and dairy for a while. I will then add in some meat but not to much to avoid pain.

This week we will have the time to empty the fridge, and other snacks/food we have, it will give me time to pick out recipes and get my grocery list ready to go get what I need towards the end of the week to try out new recipes for the following week. I will try to document it as much as I can and share it with you.

                                          Happy New Year everyone!!