It has been ages since I last wrote here in my journal. Shame on me ❗ 😳 Guess I had better get caught up. I have continued to swim every Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I never swim less than 50 lenghts which is just 4 lenghts shy of 2/3 of a mile. Most times I swim 3/4 to 1 full mile. I have not done any walking out in the woods for the last two weeks. I was hiking before that, but in the last two weeks I have started my NPLQ course for lifeguarding and have been training in the pool a lot. Also, my Indian Head Massage course is winding down and will be done on Monday this week if I am ready or not. I have passed my pratical assessment and my written assessment with flying colours. No remediation at all 😉 I just have to turn in my portfolio and sit my external exam for Health and Safety on Monday and than I am done with that course. I have a few weeks more of the NPLQ course and will sit my assessment for that around the 19th of June. I injured my shoulder in class last weekend. We were doing casulaty handling and rolling in CPR and one of the girls was using me for a casualty. She flipped me over hard and I remember yelling in pain as my shoulder popped and I told her that she was not supposed to dislocate the shoulder of the casualty. Well, she tore the front part of the shoulder capsule. (the bicep tendon and the front part of the joint). I have my full range of movement through the shoulder but with any rotation there is pain even though I can do it. So have had to modify my training. I am no longer lifting myself out of the pool in the deep end without the ladder. will do it for the assessment since I can do it but not in the next few weeks since that puts a lot of stress on the shoulder. Also, still swimming but not doing as much or as hard of training. Only swimming breaststroke or sidestroke. No front crawl or backstroke, there is too much rotation of the shoulder in that. I have not been to Tai Chi for the last three weeks because of the long drive and the pups being so close to coming. The first week that I missed was because Chaz and I were down in Leeds speaking to two different plastic surgeons about reconstructive work on all my loose skin. Both said that they would be willing to do my surgery right now even though my BMI is higher than the textbooks say to do it at, but they are both happy that I want to wait and do it in February. That is another 9 months and will let me know if my weight is truely stablized at 235-240 pds or if I will lose more, as well as it will allow me to finish my courses that I am on right now, do my Swedish body massage course in the fall and than be ready to recuperate in February and March which are slower times for most of the things that I normally do anyways. I haven’t really lost any weight in the last two months. since my one year anniversary I have lost about 5 pds and that is in about 2.5 months. Having said that, with all the exercise and all I have come down another size. I can wear my US size 14 blue jeans from Lane Bryant and that was the original size that I wanted to be. If I had my tummy tuck done now, I would fit into any size 14 possibly size 12. I never thought that I would be into a size 14 blue jean at 235 pds of weight, but I seem to be much more solid with more muscle on my body than I did when I was in highschool. I have applied for a part time position at our local pool for reception work at the sports club/lifeguarding at the pool. I have not heard back from the application as of yet. We have had puppies arrive. Prue had 8 puppies on last Wednesday and Abbey had 6 puppies last night/this morning. All of Prue’s puppies are fine and healthy. Abbey lost her first puppy. It was stuck and she could not deliver it. We had the vet coming out to the house at about midnight, but she had us working to try to pull the pup from Abbey. The pup was feet first and I was thankful there was no movement in the pup because I had to pull rather hard to get it out and thought I might kill it if it had been alive. It took ove 20 minutes of Chaz and I pulling on the pup combined with Abbey straining with labour to get that pup out, that was after over 40 minutes of her trying to get the pup out herself without us helping. She had five more later. The second one had a bit of help from the vet, but the last four came out easier. One puppy has a deformed twisted hind leg. We took all the puppies and Abbey to the vet this morning and she said that they are pink, warm and look healthy. Several are very small and have poor sucking strenght so we are looking at maybe having to use a bottle to feed them. And the one with the twisted leg might be ok later. The vet wanted to see her to see if we should put her down, but she thought the pup should be given a chance to see how she comes on. The vet said that the hind leg looked like it was twisted because of how she laid in the womb and that it might straighten out. We have to reevaluate at 4 weeks. If it is still twisted badly than we might be looking at amputation when the pup is older or putting her down. I hope that the leg straightens out becuase I don’t know what I feel about either of the alternatives. So we have 13 puppies all totaled now, and of those 6 are merles, 2 are tricolour black tan and whites, 3 black and whites, 2 are very strange markings with perdominately white with black spotting and merele markings so would be technially merels but not your typical markings. One of the merles in particular is almost all white with only a tiny bit of gray markings to make it a merle and we are considering keeping that one. there is a tricolour that Chaz also likes so we will see. 😆 They can not all stay 😯 I did go back to that second belly dancing class but danced in heels and found that reduced almost to elimination the pain in my knees as well as I rather enjoyed it. the first week was working with veils and I hated that but the actual belly dancing I really enjoy. So over the last few weeks, I have been very focused on the pups, belly dancing, lane swimming, training in the pool for the NPLQ, and getting my Indian Head Massage course finished. Chaz has also been working on getting the kennels finished and doing a lot of work on that too. so these have been some rather busy weeks. the week before last, I did over 15 hours of hard training exercise. last week was a slower week with me only doing about 6 hours of exercise. This week so far I have managed to get in about 5 hours in since I didn’t go to belly dancing or to Tai Chi this week. Some of that was training for NPLQ too. With the pups coming and the delivery being difficult and the end of the Indian Head Massage course as well as the injured shoulder I feel rather overwhelmed this week. 🙄 I did an interview on Friday with a reporter for New! magazine, and on Tuesday they had a photographer come and do a photo shoot with me. I think that it will be out sometime in a few weeks. wonder how it will be. well off for now, have managed to avoid my homework enough now and should get on with it. 😕