Folks, I have missed you. And man, do I wish I’d been posting instead of dealing with what I have been the past 3.5 weeks (is it only 3 and a half weeks? it feels like months!).

In case you’re interested in what’s kept my whole household occupied nonstop this whole time, keep reading. The short version is that my husband and I bought a house, we had some serious contractor issues that immediately took me (and my little boy and my husband) away from easy Internet access for quite some time, and then I fell down a flight of stairs, putting me out of commission and unable to care for my son, all while I should have been preparing to move. And then this past Friday I finally did move. Whew — just writing out the short version reminds me of how much stress that I’ve dealt with lately. And as of today, I’m finally back online and ready to get back to blogging as usual.

And now for the long version just in case you want more details. I’ll skip to the juicy parts, but here’s the deal:

When I last posted, my husband and I were in the process of buying a house in another suburb of NYC that’s about 45 minutes away when there’s zero traffic, or an hour and a half on any normal day. Just buying a house takes a lot of time dealing with banks and lawyers, of course, but we had to have some significant work done on the house — at the last minute, unexpectedly — before the bank would even allow us to buy the place. Bummer.

That would have been fine if not for the fact that one of the 2 additional projects needing done before we moved in — the replacement of the scary boiler in the basement (one of my son’s Dr. Seuss books has one that looks far less frightening than that beast!) — went very, very wrong. Within 2 days of installation, a huge leak sprang in the bedroom and literally soaked through the entire ceiling of my living room, causing that grand old plaster ceiling to fall down in a million tiny little pieces.

Which meant more construction, painting, you name it. Which also meant much more supervising of contractors an hour and a half away from home, where we were up to our ears in boxes because we’d actually expected to move a few days before Christmas.

In the meantime, the boiler conked out again (yep, the brand new one), causing us to have to both deal with countless service calls and monitor the house constantly. Mind you, this was over the holidays, when we were supposed to already have moved and be unpacking and spending time with family, but instead we had to spend that time in a hotel near my new house so that we could make sure our new house wasn’t falling apart at the seams. And because it was Christmas, we couldn’t find anyone to look after our kitties, which meant driving back and forth very regularly to check on them.

There’s more on the note of home improvement nightmares (and even now, 3+ weeks out, I have service technicians working on my boiler — literally as I write this post — who are trying to figure out why it conked out for 18 hours this past weekend while it was 20 degrees F outside and magically came back on), but that’s the big stuff.

And then there’s the little issue of me falling down a flight of stairs in my new house and having to spend pretty much an entire week immobilized so that my back could heal. I was extremely lucky because I landed on my butt before hitting my back, so nothing got broken. But I was bruised very, very badly, and I literally could almost not move for several days. My mother flew in (the day after flying home from her holiday trip here to Hotelville — yep, Christmas at a hotel is as blah as it sounds like it would be) to help care for my son (who’s 13 months old and was really confused as to why his mama wasn’t able to pick him up and play).

It’s now 2 weeks out from the fall, and though I’ve been caring for my son now for a week without help (when my husband is at work, I mean!), I still have some pain in the back muscles injured from the fall and have had to pare my activities down to those absolutely necessary, but I am much better and thrilled to be able to get back to life as usual. I’ve sadly had to postpone any plans to work out until my back is completely better (so my New Year’s resolution is on hold till I heal), but otherwise I feel like myself again. Finally.

And then we moved this past Friday, have dealt with additional issues related to buying a charming, but not perfectly maintained house built in the 1920s and — as already mentioned, so I’ll spare the details — the blasted boiler, and are literally up to our eyeballs in boxes of stuff that seems like so much less when it’s properly contained in cabinets and shelves and not sad brown moving boxes. But soon enough we’ll be settled in, and life goes on.

In case you’re wondering how my sanity is holding up, I have to say that with the exception of dealing with acute pain from my back injury at times, I’ve tried hard to keep my cool and not sweat even the huge stuff, and I’ve mostly succeeded. One vendor even complimented me on not yelling during a particularly nasty construction setback. *lol*

And to get this back to the subject of nutrition and life balance, I believe firmly that in the “olden days” when I didn’t eat right and didn’t have my life in balance, I would have ended up losing it amid all the nonsense this past month. There would have been many tears, many fights with my husband and sorrows drowned in pint after pint of ice cream full of things I don’t even consider food anymore. I’d probably have gained a lot of weight over that month. And I’d feel raw, scared, bitter, incapable — afraid I couldn’t survive another setback.

So while I wouldn’t want to relive the last month of my life, I can look back on it with some real pride. I survived. The only tears were from back pain and a sense of utter helplessness when I realized I couldn’t care for my son on my own, and those were short-lived in the scheme of things. Believe it or not, I managed to eat well the entire time (even being forced to sit completely still for all my waking hours, mind you!), with only a little extra salt and oil on occasion. And now I’m back and ready to write, coach, you name it.

It’s nice to be back. Oh yes, it’s nice to be back.