Baby Steps

After spending many months hopelessly addicted to this amazing blog, I’m thrilled to introduce myself as (I think!) the last of the new contributors.  You’ll be able to catch me here every other Wednesday.  Not only am I new to Not Dabbling, I’m also new to blogging!  Yep, this is my first ever blog post.

I’m DeeDee, and I hail from the flat cornfields of central Indiana.  The husband and I have 4 boys, ages 2,3,4, & 7.  Our 4 dogs (Gus, Roxy, JoJo, and Velma) are our other babies!  We have owned and operated a dog grooming business in our small town for almost 10 years.  While I’m a complete work in progress in the real food area of not dabbling in normal, much of our married lives we’ve taken the road less traveled in comparison to a lot of our peers.  We have always tried to keep faith first, family and friends second, and work last.  In doing that, we definitely don’t live an extravagant life (at least according to our culture’s standards), but we make it work!

I’ve grown up on real food, but as we’ve tried to maintain the aforementioned priorities, it began to seem like it was much easier to hit the old drive through after work so I could spend time with the family instead of cooking dinner, cleaning up the kitchen, etc.  As each year has passed, the scale has crept up on me big time.  I knew we were in a major rut when the 2 year old began throwing fits if we would drive by the golden arches without stopping!  I was also getting extremely frustrated as the money we earned each week seemed to disappear little by little as we sometimes ate out 2-3 times each day.

Lucky for me, the husband is really good at taking initiative & getting things done little by little.  He has always been frustrated with my “all or nothing” ways.  I would spend so much time on blogs (such as this one!) dreaming about what kind of life I wanted, but feeling completely overwhelmed on where to begin.

In the meantime, due to my weight and being on my feet a lot for work (and life in general!), I developed plantar fasciitis.  I opted to seek treatment from a chiropractor as I hadn’t seen good results from acquaintances who’d sought out conventional medicine.  Getting everything back to where it should be has really helped.  He also encouraged me to take small steps to better health instead of my all or nothing approach that obviously hadn’t been working for me!

While I still have a REALLY long way to go, I’ve made some progress.  I’ve made it a priority to plan ahead, which has taken our drive through visits down considerably, which has caused some money to reappear!  I’ve also tried to make growing/cooking real food a bigger part of our lives, and guess what?  The boys LOVE to help me both in the garden and the kitchen!  Making these small changes has saved us a ton of money, has helped me lose a few pounds (many more to go!), and has given us more time together as a family.  I’ve also learned a lot of things that I feel have been lost to my generation of women.  For example, this past weekend the boys and I made our own pumpkin puree for the pumpkin soup we’ll be feasting on for the Dark Days Challenge! Of course, some of my friends think I’m crazy, but I know from past posts I’ve read here that many of you have experienced that as well!

So, a big thank you to all of you awesome contributors and those who comment here… you have inspired me (and many others I’m sure!) to make these small changes that will lead to big results.  Though I’m not nearly as far down this path as many of you are, I’ve started my journey, and I can’t wait to share more of it with you!