A Little Bubbly

No, not champagne. As I've mentioned before, I'm not a big drinker, for various reasons. But if I were to choose an alcoholic beverage it would most certainly NEVER be Champagne. In fact, Sam and I have received two FREE bottle of champagne in our life and we've yet to consume any of it. We attempted to toast to our 2nd anniversary with a free bottle and managed a picture before we spit it out. GROSS!!!

Fakers. We received a free bottle of champagne from the Ritz Carlton
for our 2nd anniversary. Here's us after dinner, trying to take advantage
of the situation. The bottle remained nearly full. : (

No, this is about my love affair with Diet Coke. Basically in ranks of love, Diet Coke comes just after Sam. Well I guess Sterling and Everest sneak in there, and my mom, but Diet Coke is like a MAJOR love of mine. It basically tastes like heaven.

When we got super serious about trying to make a baby, and after the realization that it wan't going to be easy, I went a little psycho and researched EVERYTHING that might POSSIBLY cause birth defects and miscarriage and all manor of awful things. I decided to go ahead and live as if I was pregnant. So I eliminated all caffeine from my life unless I was on my period. This meant switching to caffeine free Diet Coke. Gag. How can it taste so different? Does caffeine have a flavor? However I persevered. 

Finally, I decided to just give up Diet Coke, in all forms. I wasn't really enjoying the caffeine free variety, and despite the fact that a can of coke has waaaayyyyy less than the recommended 200mg limit of caffeine, I wasn't willing to drink the full flavor variety in case it might possibly negatively affect a pregnancy on the off chance that I actually got pregnant. I lasted 18 days without a taste of my beloved beverage. Then my husband had one and I took a sip. Rocked my world! How had I lived without it? 

Since then I've been waffling back and forth. I've fallen off the wagon quite a bit I hate to admit. I am definitely an addict. I'll go three or four days without and then drink it every day for a few days before I get the will to go again. It's not something that I can have a little bit of. The more I drink it, the more it is the ONLY thing I want to consume. For me, it's got to be an all or nothing kind of thing. I don't see myself able to restrict myself to one a week or one a month as a transition period.

Here's my conundrum. There are basically two things that I love about Diet Coke that I can determine: the sweetness and the bubbly. The sweetness I can achieve via other beverages, albeit they aren't necessarily that much better for me. Crystal Light is normally my method of consuming water. I hate water. I can drink it if it is SUPER cold (and I'm hot), but I don't like it. And if it is not beyond frigid, it kind of makes me gag. But the carbonation… I'm binging hard for carbonation after about 4-5 days without it.

Here's another problem that I've noticed: when I don't drink lovely, sparkly, bubbly beverages, I don't drink much of anything. On a typical NO DIET COKE day, I'll realize about 2pm that I've had nothing to drink all day. If there's some Crystal Light on hand, I'll pour a glass, if not, I just think about not thinking about Diet Coke. I normally find that I drink about two glasses of some flavored concoction a day, and that's because I made myself. Recently, I discovered these little gems:

Dasani flavor drops

I love the fact that you don't have to wait for powdery stuff to dissolve. You don't have to shake it or stir it. Beautiful! I'm definitely finding that the ease and the ability to change flavors throughout the day make me drink a bit more. But let's be real here. If my purpose is to stop drinking Diet Coke because it's full of artificial this and processed that, than Crystal Light and Dasani Drops aren't too much of a leap forward are they?

So I come before you with my plight. My greatest wish is for something carbonated that isn't artificially sweetened, but that also doesn't contain a zillion calories. I'm normally a zero calorie only girl as far as drinks go, but I could swing for like 50 calories or something like that. Anybody have some recommendations for beverages I should try?