I have had a stomach bug or something this week. I had one exactly this time last womanly cycle. It really made me paranoid about Toxic Shock Syndrome since I had the fever, headaches, and nausea both times. I even went to urgent care to have tests run, but they blew me off. I am not sure they even did the tests for TSS. That did not stop them from prescribing me antibiotics (which isn’t a treatment for TSS) even though the doctor freely admitted she couldn’t find anything wrong with me even after doing flu swabbing and blood tests. I guess the good news is that I don’t have mono, because they tested me for that too.

Don’t forget that if you have any TSS symptoms at all, you can always visit You ARE Loved and download their pamphlet to bring to your doctor. You can also @ them on Twitter @youAREloved . I believe Suzan is the one who runs their Twitter and she is AMAZING. She talked me through the whole experience via DM. A big Thank You to my YAL friends!

I think my conclusion might be that apparently my immune system is taking a bit of a dive around the beginning of my period each month (TMI? you’re welcome.), which results in me catching whatever stomach bug is going around. I am planning on treating myself with Thieves Oil and taking extra probiotics during the first few days of my next cycle and we’ll see how that goes.

I am trying out a new product this month – NingXia Red. It’s a supplement that’s supposed to have tons of vitamins and antioxidants. I will do a post about it as soon as I see how it’s going! (post and link has been deleted due to FDA guidelines)

I failed to do a garden update post this week, so I’ll try to do that this weekend. However, here are a few shots of the sprouts that are coming up from the seeds I planted!! Some of the seeds were possibly washed away last weekend in the rain, so they aren’t all coming up and not in the places I originally planted them, but that’s OK. I think?

On the other hand, the seeds I was supposed to start inside the house have done nothing at all after 3 weeks. Pretty sure they’re dead. Which sucks since I was really hoping for lots of nice organic bell peppers. Those things are stinking expensive at the store!

Ah well, maybe I can trade beets or peas to someone for bell peppers.

This week we also got to visit my friend Ashleigh‘s chickens so that Little Sir could see what they were like. He was very excited the whole few blocks to her house and kept saying how we were “going to see the chickens!”. I asked him if he wanted to get some chickens of his own and he said yes!

I was all excited to dye Easter eggs with Little Sir using natural foods for dyes, even though I only had 3 truly white eggs (the rest are brown or bluish or whatever comes out of the free ranging hens). I tried using red lettuce and beet juice for red and this is what I got:

Exactly the same color as the brown hen eggs.
Great.
It also took more than 30 minutes to do this terrible dye job.
I am not trying any more natural dyes, forget it. I will go use the toxic stuff. Christian and I are the only ones who will actually eat the eggs anyway, neither of the kids will eat hard boiled. We’ve spent more than 30 years eating dyed Easter eggs and it hasn’t killed us yet.

One of my next goals is to acquire a bread machine. I am determined to stop having to buy gourmet bread from the grocery bakery, even if it is only $2 a loaf. I just have to figure out how to get one for little to no money. If you have an extra one lying around, let me know!

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Well that’s all for this week, be sure to visit Conversion Diary for links to more 7 Quick Takes Fridays.