One for the books

Saturday was my hubby's birthday. Happy birthday, sweetheart! I'm so lucky that you don't put much stock in birthdays, because it would have been a real disappointment. I hope you know how much I love you and that I intended for it to be a good day for you.

So for the rest of you, here's how our day went. I had received a phone call from the primary president the night before telling me that she and her kids had tested positive for swine flu. Having been in her car visiting teaching with her on Wednesday night, I couldn't help but worry that my family had the virus as well. We had all been sick for over a week, and didn't seem to be getting better. I worried all night, especially because we were already with my good friend and her kids (sorry Becky!) and I didn't want them to get sick. Unfortunately, we had a practice Saturday morning for Sunday's primary program and I was now not only pianist, but filling in for the president as well. So I left my kids at home and wore a mask to the practice, where the rest of the presidency and I talked to the bishop and decided to go ahead with the program, even without 1/3 of the kids and the president and myself, the first counselor and pianist. (Wearing a mask is a great way to convince people they should stay away from you. If you ever need to get out of something, I highly recommend it!) The minute I got home from the practice, we loaded the kids in the car and headed to the clinic to find out if we have swine flu.

Poor John. I had been so stressed out that we were sitting in the waiting room, all wearing the required masks and trying to find the humor in the situation, when I realized that I had never even wished him a happy birthday. And of course, we spent the next few hours wrestling our kids and trying to survive a 6-person visit to the clinic. Fun times, I tell you! The good news--Katelyn and Carter were definitely over any illness and weren't even tested. The rest of us were tested for swine flu, but wouldn't get the results until Monday. Assuming that we had it, they sent us home with Tamiflu.

I'm grateful to my mother-in-law, whom we had already exposed to our illness several times in the last week. She had already had whatever we did, and agreed to still take our kids for the date we had planned that night. We headed to dinner at Black Angus, where John had a gift card he'd gotten for his birthday. However, there is no longer a Black Angus in Salt Lake. I wasn't too disappointed when we ended up at Ruby River. But when we headed to the movie we've been dying to see (The Invention of Lying), we found out that I had ordered our tickets online to the wrong theater. The only explanation I can offer, since we go to this theater all the time and always order our tickets online, is that sickness and stress had totally messed with my brain. Since it was showtime, we had no choice but to pay for 2 more tickets. We had a blast, but John will never let me forget the date to a nonexistent restaurant and tickets to the wrong movie theater.

I found out when we went to pick up the kids that the main side effect of Tamiflu is nausea and vomiting. It put a little damper on the evening, but we still went home and put the kids to bed and watched some shows together before passing out in our bed.

We made the most of our forced sick time while we waited for our test results (home from church Sunday and work & school Monday) and finished our bathroom, finally. Wanna see? Here's the only before picture I could come up with (and yes, that's Carter when we bought this house):

So even though you didn't see the shower before, hopefully you can appreciate this. The old one was big sheets of vinyl or plastic that looked like tile glued to the walls. The tub had completely lost its finish and always looked dirty, no matter how I scrubbed it. We got a new tub and put up real tile. John and I had a fun 4 hours racing to cut the tiles for the edges with the saw we rented before we had to get it back to Home Depot.

John was skeptical about the paint color, but as usual he let me do what I wanted, and we're happy with it. It's a very pale blue with a bit of turquoise to it. It's really soothing, and goes well with the beige of the floor and shower tile. We had a very basic laminate counter top built for the space, which John installed himself along with a new sink. I painted the old vanity and got new hardware, and bought a cheap mirror and painted it white, and we got a cute light fixture. The old one was an ugly medicine cabinet with 3 globe light bulbs on top - I'm sure you've seen one like it.

So we're super excited to have a clean, new-feeling bathroom. All the white makes it feel particularly clean and fresh. I know it's hard to get a good sense of it from the pics, but it's really hard to get pictures of such a small room. Guess you'll just have to come see it in person!

We got the results of our tests on Monday. Aidan was positive for swine flu, although the rest of our tests were negative. Since we had already been sick over a week when we were tested, I'm sure we all had it, and I'm a little relieved to think that we may have built up immunities to the virus. Tanner has strep on top of it all.

And now for this morning's adventure. I had a feeling that something was going wrong while I was switching the laundry downstairs. I came up to find that Aidan had gotten into (literally) the bucket of flour that I had stupidly left on the floor with the lid on but not closed tightly. I considered my options for a second before I remembered that we know for sure that he has swine flu. Thank goodness the bucket wasn't quite half full, but still a waste of a lot of flour! All I could do was laugh, especially since he thought he was quite funny and enjoyed me trying to knock the flour off of his clothes and out of his hair. (Notice his little tool box in the middle of the mess.)

Now that I'm looking at this picture, it doesn't look half as messy as it is in real life. Guess I'd better be done with the computer so I can clean my floor!