My husband was just diagnosed with high blood pressure.  In addition, some blood work apparently came back alarmingly high, which requires a return trip to the doctor this Friday.  This morning, as I bent to lift Dom from his crib, I pulled a muscle in my back – before I even got my hands on the boy.  My ankle hurts in the cold, and my knee buckles if I stand too long.

All of this adds up to one fact…we are getting old.  There are some things about which we can do nothing.  My old ankle injury (actually, three breaks to the same ankle.  Just call me Grace) falls into that category, and I have resigned myself to future arthritis.  But there are other things we can do to halt those annoying illnesses that come with age.  Our Scarlett O’Hara mentality has to end – tomorrow is here, and the day after tomorrow will be really ugly if we don’t make some changes.

So, I have banished salt from our house.  Okay, not altogether.  The saltshaker is still here, but Dom can no longer lick the top of it – it is in a cabinet.  Instead of salt in my cooking, I am using a salt-free seasoning blend.  Instead of butter, I am using some sort of congealed, rubbery orangish stuff that is supposed to taste like butter (it doesn’t).

I am still working on cutting refined starches from our diets.  It is really, really hard to bake a healthy cookie that tastes good.  But I have made positive changes in this direction, too:  I Freecycled all the junk food and I have a huge bag of boxed items to donate to the food bank. 

The thing is, I have always been ultra-paranoid about Dom’s diet.  He eats organic candy-covered sunflower seeds instead of M&Ms, for heck’s sake.  I puree veggies and hide them in foods he will eat.  If only I were half as paranoid about our health as I am his, we probably could have headed off the situation we are now facing. 

My main concern, though, is Dom, even now.  If he grows up watching us eat Big Macs and Soft Taco Supremes, he will end up eating them himself.  And then, someday, his wife will be writing something like this in her diary.  So, new day, new leaf turned over. 

Just for the record, though, I miss M&Ms.