Remember how my blog won Best in Show for this year’s Wego Health Activist Awards?

I know you’re all like “WE KNOW, RACHEL. Your blog is great, WE GET IT.” But hold on! Because I super didn’t expect to win. And when I was nominated, I super didn’t expect to get a care package of goodies including a Health Activist t-shirt. At that point I was like “Wowee kazowie! I didn’t think I’d get a super official shirt to wear! This is AWESOME and can’t get better!”

THEN I won, which was crazy. I feel like this blog is so little in the internet world. And I did look to see if there was a prize or anything, but I somehow concluded that the prize was the exposure. And I got a LOT of exposure! Blog views were great and my twitter EXPLODED and everything was awesome!

So life went on. I felt my blog was validated and happily continued writing. When my dad got sick and had to have open heart surgery for an ascending aortic aneurism, I found myself spending a lot of time in a hospital with craptacular wifi or at home watching my little sister while my mom was away with dad.

At day 6 of this hospital caregiving life, I was feeling pretty worn out. I’m only 11 weeks pregnant but I’m out of breath all the time, and my head was killing me when I got home from another long day.

And there was this package there from Wego Health. I opened it and pulled out the congratulatory letter. Attached was a playlist for Health Activists, which I thought was such a fun idea. I thought “Maybe they made a mix CD for the winners!” and was pretty excited by that notion.

So imagine my face when I pulled this out:

WHAT IS HAPPENING OMG.

Wego Health is an awesome organization that is really serious about not only connecting health activists, but rewarding them and encouraging them to keep going! Keep blogging, keep tweeting, it DOES make a difference! I was just beside myself. It was like my blog just Pinocchio’d into a REAL thing.

This just made my week. And it’s been a really hard week.

On top of that, Dad is coming home today! Life isn’t completely back to normal yet, but we can see it getting there.

Normal or not, life is good.