Last Monday, I was all set to write a post titled "No More Excuses!" I basically had the whole thing written in my head. All I needed to do was type it, spell check it, and post it. The gist of it was I have no more excuses for putting off taking care of myself. The baptism party was over, there are no all-you-can-eat holidays in the very near future and the weather is expected to warm up enough for me to walk outside again soon.

That's it. No more excuses. No reasons for letting my blood sugar slide. No whining that it's too cold to exercise. No cupcakes in the cupboards. Absolutely nothing to get in my way. I was set to diet, to exercise and to take care of my diabetes. And nothing was gonna stop me now.

Then the mother of all excuses struck. Sick baby. Followed by sick hubby. Followed by sick me. And rounded out with a return of the sick baby. It seems two distinctly different stomach bugs visited my home in the last week. The first one, little man apparently picked up in the church nursery. The second hubby brought home from school.

The first was messy, but relatively mild. The boy went through eight outfits a day for a few days, but was all smiles on the changing table. My diet wasn't derailed by it though, just my grand designs of exercising every day. Unless you count at least a dozen trips up and down the stairs to change diapers.

The second bug was a nasty one. At first, I though hubby caught the same virus as the baby, which surprised me since he hadn't spent much time with the kid, let alone changed diapers all week (in his defense, he's usually a very hands-on dad, but his schedule was packed with school events). In truth, I thought he was being somewhat of a wimp about it, but who am I to judge.

A day later, it struck me with a vengeance. It left me lying on the bathroom floor writhing in agony and moaning as if I were in labor. (Incidentally, I'm still traumatized by the whole labor experience and every time I get a pain in the belly, my mind flashes back to labor. I'm hoping this is normal and temporary, but who knows, I could be nuts.)

This bug derailed my diet and my blood sugar management big time. I was fortunate that it did not strike me as hard as it did hubby. Someone had to take care of the baby still, which I managed to do between trips to the bathroom. But it made a mess of my eating.

What's more, I was running low on test strips and just about out of any healthy food in the house. And it was snowing out. I was thinking toast, but the bread was covered in mold (how does that happen so quickly?). The best I could do was whole-wheat dinner rolls I had in the freezer, of which I ate six along with a few bottles of Gatorade. When my appetite returned later that day, I ate a dinner of cheese and crackers.

Since I was running low on test strips and didn't know when I'd get to the pharmacy to pick up more, I decided not to test unless I felt really funky. The one time I thought I might be low, I was 180. Ugh! Then I read the label on Gatorade and discovered it's packed with my arch enemy corn syrup. Is that really necessary?? What else is there to drink when you're laid up with the stomach bug?

Once I was feeling better, however, the little man caught what we had. I now know, without a doubt, the difference between spit up and throw up. I now long for the days of innocence before I knew!

The bugs seem to be gone now, so this week, really, officially, no more excuses!