sick day

I woke up this morning feeling really weird-- dizzy, weak, nauseated.  I took a shower and then went back to bed.  I told the boys I was sick and they had a free day.  The whoops of delight resounded throughout the neighborhood.  :-)  I woke up briefly about 3 times, and then got up at 5:30 PM.  I can't believe how long I slept.  I still feel weird, but about 75% better than I did this morning.  No idea if I have a virus or if it is a few weeks of ridiculous sleep hours catching up with me...  The problem is that now I have to deal with the aftermath of the boys' free day, which will probably keep me up late again.  And so the cycle continues.  :-)

The past few days have been fairly unremarkable.  School.  Laundry.  Practicing.  More laundry.  More school.  More practicing.  :-)  Brigham's and Mosey's violin lessons have been moved back 15 minutes, so now we have time to drop Joseph off at home after piano lessons before going to violin, which Joseph is happy about.  So on Thursday we came home to drop Joseph off, and do some last minute practicing with Mosey.  He then packed up his violin in his case and jumped in the van... leaving his violin case on the table.  We got to his lessons (25 minutes away) and he looked around and said, "Mom... I left my violin at home!"  Oops.  So Brigham got an extra-long lesson that day and Mosey got to play with Dusty (the dog) to his heart's content.

 Here's Brigham practicing his violin.  Hanging upside down across the arm of the couch.  Hey, whatever works!

Friday was a fun day.  A friend came to lunch and brought the boys new legos!  They spent the next few hours putting them together (go-cart for Mosey, helicopters for Joseph and Brigham), breaking for a couple of hours while we went to horseback riding, and then finishing up strong after we got home.  Mosey required a little bit of help on his, but I was still impressed with how well he did on his own.  Brigham also built his tallest Kapla block tower yet.  It touched the ceiling!

Saturday was a very busy day for me.  I went to a leadership training broadcast at the Stake Center from 10-12, then met a friend for lunch at Mesa Rosa.  She is the mother of one of Mosey's preschool friends from a couple of years ago.  She and I met at the preschool's "Meet the Teacher" morning.  I had just returned home from my transplant, and was sitting there with my bald head in a scarf, cane leaning against the chair.  She came up to me and said, "It looks like you had about as fun a summer as I did."  She turned around to show me the back of her head-- hair just beginning to grow back around a long scar where she had brain surgery.  She has a chronic disease, too, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, which has landed her in the hospital many times, and required multiple serious surgeries.  We've talked a lot about having a chronic illness, and how to balance worries about an uncertain future with being a wife and mother.  It was so good to talk to her.  I have many understanding friends and family, but some things can only be understood by someone else going through the same thing.

After lunch I went to another friend's house to take baptism portraits of her cute son.  He was about the most cooperative, dreamiest little photography subject I have ever worked with!  She wants a pencil-sketch image for her son's baptism announcements, which was why I have been playing around with a few different photoshop techniques.

In the evening I went to see a movie!  Something I haven't done for a while.  I went to see "The King's Speech," which was so, so, so good.  It was also rated R which was an absolutely ridiculously unwarranted rating.  There is about 15 seconds in the speech therapist's office where Bertie yells out a string of bad words as part of a therapy technique-- to show him how he can be fluent under certain circumstances.  It was the most unoffensive use of bad words that I've ever heard, and there was not a single other objectionable thing in the whole movie.  I heard way more offensive language in 30 seconds walking through the group of teenagers gathered around the entrance to the mall where I saw the movie, and I am not exaggerating.  I would be 100% comfortable having my kids watch the movie, and they definitely will watch it at some point.  I really wanted Ben to come with me, but he has a strict "no-rated-R-movie" stance.  I generally do, too, because it is so easy to justify bad scenes which then never leave your brain, and I figure I might miss out on some good movies using that policy, but I definitely will miss out on a lot of crummy movies.  But this movie truly was an exception worth making.  The subject matter is near and dear to my heart-- King George VI of England who had a very bad stutter ("stammer" in England), but who, as King during WWII was needed to give many speeches to rally and uplift his countrymen.  It was so well done, and so poignant to me, as a stutterer, and I think to anyone, really.  I really wish Ben had seen it with me.  I recommend it wholeheartedly.

After the movie I then spent about 4 hours working on the photos I took earlier in the day.  The pencil-sketch technique I found is really awesome, but is not easy.  It actually does take quite a lot of drawing skill, but it was really fun to do.  And way easier than an actual pencil drawing, since erasing mistakes is much easier, and the ability to change pencil "width" and darkness was more than what I can do with the art supplies I currently have. 

Yesterday was Sunday.  I was so tired after church, because of the 3:30 AM bedtime the night (morning) before, and Ben told me to take a nap while he made dinner and straightened up the house.  That's a better Valentine's gift than chocolate, if you ask me. 

That brings me to today.  Now it is 11:00 and I really, really should go to bed.  But the house is still a disaster (it didn't clean itself up while I've been on the computer), so I guess I will clean it up.  Fun, fun!!  :-)