Creative Me

This has been a hard week. My back is only getting worse; I had a dr. appt today & an MRI now on Monday. BigSpeak got sick yesterday afternoon (fever and throwing up, just fever now) and still is, and LittleSpeak is busy being LittleSpeak in the middle of it all. I haven't written about my back this week because it's rehashing the same old thing, but today I hit a new low. I called DaddySpeak at work & asked him to please come home. With one child I can more or less pull it off, but with two; one sick and the other wanting lots of attention, I just couldn't pull it off. I needed to lie down for at least 10 mins ever half hour (that's how I've made it through the week so far) & it just wasn't happening. DS was a trooper and took a taxi from South City to his car in the South Bay (he takes a van pool). Luckily his company allows for this type of thing once a quarter and will cover what I'm sure was a very expensive ride. I popped a couple pain pills and parked myself on the couch w/lots of support pillows, and promptly passed out. I'm just so exhausted from the pain. I'll let you know more on this when I do, my current dr believes that they will be recommending surgery, but I'm holding out hope. I just don't feel like I'm at that point yet. I'm not sure what that point will be, but it will be before I permanently have a dropped foot. And the point I'm at now is unacceptable. I can't care for my kids!

In spite of the above, I am doing something "just for me" this week, and loving it. I haven't really been cropping the last several months. I guess it was just feeling a little stale, so I signed up for a class at Jessica Sprague.com . I'm loving it. The class I signed up for is a writing class, it was the next one offered and I was feeling desperate. My degree is in communications, which is more than half writing, although you probably can't tell from the way I usually write here. I didn't realize how much I missed writing. I wouldn't say anything in the class has been "new" for me. Most of the techniques were ones I've done in school or at work at some point. But having someone assign me a topic and homework is really helping to get me inspired. We are given a new writing "technique" one day and the next we use our journal entries to help create a new page. In addition, we're getting new templates, papers, etc...to help in designing our pages which is always fun. I can't believe how much inspiration I'm getting from doing this. I'm so excited I'm signing up for the next class (an intermediate photoshop class) next month. I'm excited to be excited about something for me for a change.

The page we did yesterday was about ourselves, something most scrapbookers are notoriously poor about doing. The shoemakers kids have no shoes kind of thing.... It's the first page I've ever done about myself & I really enjoyed doing it. I'm really happy with the result, so I decided to share it here. (Pix is from BigSpeak's first day of school & the photo is offset because she's right next to me, but I also think it brought in a cool artistic effect...at least I'm going to keep telling myself that.)
Tell me you love it, even if you think it's lame. I'm really proud of it.