I'm Okay!!

Alright, well we went to Urgent Care around 7:00 and got back a little bit after 9:00. After talking to the doctor, he thought that it could be some build up in my intestines, appendicitis, or an infection in my gall bladder. So I had blood drawn, x-rays were taken, and a urinary sample. After everything, the x-rays pretty much gave it away. There was gas in my intestines and my intestines were trying to squeeze to get it out or something like that. So now I'm just waiting for the cramping to go away and maybe I'll end up going to school later. I missed last Wednesday, part of Friday, yesterday, and now at least some of today. I really SHOULD go to school, but the thing is... what's the use if I'm not even going to be getting anything out of it because I'm too worried about cramping? Oh, and the doctor did say that the cramping should go away and if it doesn't, we should go back in to get it checked out because in the early stages of appendicitis, the white blood cell count can be normal. So there's still a chance of appendicitis, but that's (thankfully) not what he thinks it is as of right now!! Thanks for your prayers!

??

Ok, normally it's pretty much impossible to get me sick... but in the past month or so, I've gotten stay-at-home sick 2 (maybe 3 today) times. Yesterday was #2. My parents thought I had what my dad had a week ago, which included stomach ickiness and a headache. Andrew acctually came home around 1:15 or so sick, too. The only difference was that he got sick, threw up, went and took a 2 hour nap and he was pretty much all better. So anyways, now today... I was in the shower and randomly got this major crampinng/pinching-like feeling on my right side to the point where I couldn't move anything, or take my hand off my side or it would be quite a bit more painful. Breathing even hurt a little bit if I sucked in too much air at once. It got a bit better after I got out of the shower, and now it's only minorly hurting, but we're still taking me to Urgent Care to check it out. I have to keep reminding myself that God is in control and whatever happens, He's got it all worked out and it will be for His glory. Oops... time to go!!! Please be praying!!

Procrastinating

I think that internet is terrible for me because that's pretty much how I procrastinate. I really need to practice (but I prefer not to when my family is here because I feel weird...) and I really need to get caught up in Pride & Prejudice for English. I love that book, but it's not the kind of book where you can just sit down and read it forever. So anyways, I figured that it's been a week since I last posted, and I figured, "Hmm... maybe I should do that..." So after this, I need to do some of the stuff I need to get done.
I had a few pretty awesome things happen this week. The first one being on Wednesday. We had a field trip for English to the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis to see A Midsummer Night's Dream. I wasn't really sure what to excpect, and almost leaning a bit towards expecting it to be kinda boring and confusing. That was not the case AT ALL. It was SO funny!!! I acctually started crying at parts because it was so funny. It was set in more modern day time, but stuck to the Shakespeare language, which they did in the newer version of Romeo & Juliet movie. We watched the end of that in English class and I really didn't like it. But I really loved how they did it at the Guthrie. We also got to talk to some of the people involved in the play before we saw it and we got to talk to one of the actors, which was my favorite person in the play. He was hillarious!!
Then on Friday I went on another field trip for Orchestra. We went to the Minnesota Science Museum and then saw the Minnesota Orchestra. The science museum was really fun. We did this really weird animation thing where you're supposed to plan your poses out and when they put them all together, it kinda looks like you're moving. We did something kinda like the wave. I think the coolest that we saw, though, was the mummy. I was totally fascinated. It was really cool in a disgusting, amazing kind of way. Then we all got to go off on our own for dinner and I and 4 friends went to this Chinese place which was really good. One of my friends spilled her water all over me and got rice in my shoe because they were giving me blisters and I had them off. But it's all good. I survived. :)
Last night we went over to a couple's house (Katie and Jeremiah) from our church and Katie made white chili for us and it was AMAZING!! Katie had called earlier in the day and acctually said that she was really glad that it was cold out so she could make it for us and show it off. She's so funny. :) So after that, we played Monopoly for like 3 hours and still didn't finish. I had the most money and property at the end, and was given the title of winner for that game. I've never won that game, so it was pretty much a "woah!" moment. I had so much fun playing, though! I'm pretty sure I would've lost, though, if Katie and everyone hadn't kept reminding me when people landed on my spots.
Then today, I went to a WoCo concert, which was really cool. Their themes were hope and love. Their first song, they were all in the aisles and all the lights were completely turned off and it was really cool. I got chills. There were also dancers to one of my favorite songs and they did this REALLY weird interpretive-like dance to the song and I honestly really didn't like it. I thought it was really weird and kind of distracting. But oh well. What can you do, right? Over all, the concert was really amazing!! Yay WoCo!! :)
Well... time to go get that stuff done. But I don't know... you might have a whole 'nother (I say that all the time, but have NO idea how to write it) version of this to read if I feel the need to procrastinate again!


Just kidding. :)

Recovering

I've got a couple of things that I'm recovering from today. 1) My cold that I got last weekend and still trying to get over it. 2) My extremely busy day yesterday!! It was fun, though. Jess came and picked me up around 10:00 yesterday morning and we went to The Living Room and I got my favorite chai in the world (their raspberry chai) and a lemon poppyseed muffin (which was also very good). We had a really good talk about a lot of stuff. It was super nice to see her again! About two minutes after I got dropped off at home, Elizabeth R. came over (and I haven't seen her since December) and I had my first grilling experience. It took us about an hour to grill our piece of chicken for our grilled chicken salad. It was fun, though. :) The salad was acctually really good, and I'd say it was worth the wait. After making our salad, we had an "intense" game of horse, which wasn't really very intense. About two minutes after Elizabeth's parents came to pick her up, Bekah got to our house because we went to hear John Piper with a few of my dad's students that he does a Bible study with. Bekah and I DID get into a pretty intense alphabet game where you have to find the letters on the signs. The first way we played it, it was just any letter you saw. The second game was the intense one. You could only do letters at the beginning of a word. There was this one street we were on where we got Q, V, AND X (plus all the ones in between). We had a little bit more trouble with the Y, but we eventually got it on a sign that said, "Thank You". It was pretty fun. :) As we were leaving Bethehem, though, there were a couple of damsels in distress having car trouble, and so all the guys were on the ground checking the car out, acting like they knew what they were doing. It was so funny and even more so because my dad got out his phone and took pictures, but we weren't supposed to laugh to give it away. Bekah and I had a pretty tough time with that one. :) Then we went to this AMAZING place for dinner, Annie's, and they had these malts, which were HUGE. The were absolutely AMAZING, though!! I was determined to finish mine. It was kind of funny because none of the guys finished their's, but Andrew and I finished ours. Bekah found that quite amusing. Then we played this game on the way home where each person says only one word. We had a repeated theme of eating, melons, chickens, and purple animals. The best one, though, was about Queen Fanny, the purple elephant, who ate gas stations, porkchops and other elephants (okay, so maybe that's a bit... weird... but it was pretty funny when we came up with it). All in all, it was a really fun day, but a lot to recover from!!

The Lord's Prayer

Okay, you guys, these are both SUPER ADORABLE!!!! (I especially love the little girl singing the Lord's Prayer :))

Oeuf

Okay, so my brother always makes fun of me for saying, "oeuf" whenever I pick up something heavy or have difficulties getting into the car, so I just thought that I'd point out that it is, in fact, a word. ....Alright, so it's a word in French, but a word none the less. And that word also means "egg" but oh well. Just thought I'd clear that up. :)

So anyways, this weekend was super hectic, it was insane. On Friday, I babysat my brother while my parents went to the Viennese Ball and came down with a pretty awful cold. That night, after hassles with getting Andrew to bed, I woke up around 12:45 because of a stuffy nose and loud parents and didn't fall back asleep until a little bit before 2:00. For some reason, my body just didn't want to sleep and I woke up Saturday morning around 7:30-ish (and on Saturdays, I'd usually still be sleeping until at LEAST 8:30). So all day Saturday I was freaking out calling a friend of mine because she was going to let me borrow one of her dresses for Saturday night when I got to be my dad's date to the Viennese Ball. After calling my friend a number of times and I got no call back, I resorted to calling one of the girls in my dad's choir, who we're also very good friends with her and her family, who have adopted 2 kids from China. So I went over to her dorm and tried on three dresses. One didn't fit, one went down too low, and the one that I ended up taking with me wasn't quite as dressy as I would have liked. So it was about 3:30 and we had to be at the university by 5:30 if we were going to have time to eat. So my mom and I sped off to the mall, where we quickly looked for an inexpensive dress at Deb. My mother found a dress which I absolutely adored once I tried it on, (I was so proud of her for picking out something that I liked so much) and it was only $30. So it was about 4:05 and my mother and I zipped back home and tried to get me ready as quickly as possible. We did make it on time and after we ate, I sat in the room where they do the opening ceremony for what seemed like forever. It was FREEZING in there, too. And I could've sworn that there was a breeze where we were sitting. My dad and I enjoyed laughing at the freshman guys in the men's choir because they had NO idea what they were singing when they did the Beautiful Danube (in German) and pretended to mouth the words for like 3/4 of it. (After just reading that, we sound kinda mean, but honestly, we really weren't that mean ;) ) So we did a bunch of polka (a few songs with my dad and a few with one of my buddies from the China tour in 2005) and some swing, too. We ended up leaving a little bit after 11:00 because my feet were killing me and we had to get up in the morning for church. By the time I got to bed, it was around midnight. On Sunday, after church and then lunch, my mom remembered my recital (which I was REALLY hoping she wouldn't) at the last minute because I had asked about something I was going to do this weekend. So I had to go play in that, even though I was feeling really sick, but my teacher moved me up so I played 4th instead of 3rd to last. Which was nice because then we got to leave right after I got done playing. A very lovely part of my Sunday, though, was that I got a call from Jenny, and it was so good to talk to her and acctually hear her voice again! It totally made my day. :) So I guess for the most part, that's my weekend in a nutshell and it's looking like I'm going to have another crazy weekend this week, but I'm looking forward to every single thing and it should be quite fun, even though it will be hectic!!

Insane

Well, I've had an insane couple of days. I'd have to say that yesterday was a lot better than today, though. So yesterday, was Wednesday, meaning we had dance. But Bekah wasn't able to make and so my mom drove me to Chippewa Falls and just spent the lesson time at Higher Grounds. So we basically did the normal stretching stuff and reviewing of the ballet positons and things of that sort. And we went over our dance and did some swing dancing. But there was something that we haven't done. We did 100 different kinds of sit-ups. It was totally insane and I'm pretty sure I've felt it all day long! Apparently, we're working on our 6 packs. :) So then next week, we're doing 200 and adding push-ups!! Yes, definately insane! So after dance, after some talking to our mothers, Annaka came back to Eau Claire with us (after stopping at her house for nicer clothes) to see Bethany play in her senior recital-which she did AMAZING in!! So we had quite a bit of fun sitting in my room talking and listening to music. It's really cool because I just feel so comfortable with her and we've both decided we need to do something like that again soon.

So today.... I was sort of an emotional wreck. I'm not sure quite what set it off, but I got way too stressed out and when my mom picked me up from the nasty weather of rain/snow (it was pretty much raining slush) I just started crying. I kinda felt bad because she got all shocked and was trying to help, but there's only so much you can do when you're driving and all I really needed was a hug. So I got home and talked about just one of the things that set me off and then she told me to go take a hot shower and then we could talk more. Which was a really good thing for me to do. It gave me some time to just cool down, chill out, and start thinking more logically than emotionally. Most of all, it was a good time to just pray. Basically, what happened in a nutshell was that I've been slapped in the face with the reality and sin of the world. A lot of contravercial topics have been coming up lately. With the whole school shooting thing, I overheard a few people in geometry talking and one of them asked, "If someone were to come into your classroom and tell anyone who believed in God to stand up, would you do it?" and 2 out of the three of them said they wouldn't and the other one said yes, but sort of hesitated. And all of them claim to be Christians. It was a sad thing to be listening to. Then there's been the whole issue with the Health teacher at the middle school I went to, who just announced to all of her classes that she was a homosexual. Acctually, some of you guys may acctually hear about that, because I've heard that there are newspapers and news stations that are picking up this story all around the country. I acctually had her when I was in 6th and 7th grade and she... well, there were some inappropriate things that came up. And yes, I know there will be uncomfortable things that come up, but these were things that were not in the curriculum. So those plus friend drama issues... yes, AGAIN... (which was acctually the main reason) have made my day quite interesting and emotional.

Well, I've got two tests tomorrow... one in Geometry, and the other in History, which is on ALL of WWII. A lot of stuff. I'm thinking maybe I should go over that again before tomorrow.... And hopefully I'll be a little bit less emotional by then!!

April 18th

So there's been this really big rumor going around school that some kid was going to come to school on Friday, April 18th (the anniversary of Columbine) with a gun. Almost everyone I've talked to outside of Laura and Rachel and people, have said they're not going to school that day because they were so freaked out. This has gotten so serious that our principal spent a few minutes over the announcement system talking about it. So you'd think that hearing that there's the slightest possibility that some kid might be coming into my school would freak me out, but the cool thing is that I've just felt this calmness throughout hearing about this. The thing is that even if there were to be a shooting, and I were to be shot, and I died, it's not a moment before God wanted me home. Whatever happens, God has had it planned since... well, since forever. That's the cool thing about being a follower of Christ- we don't need to fear death, we can acctually look forward to it. I just read Revalation 21 a few nights ago and was just overjoyed and so excited. I think the coolest part of that chapter, is that the reason we won't need a sun or any other light because that's how great God's glory is. God's glory gives us light. That's just so amazing!! And applying that to the whole kid with a gun thing... it's the same God. The same God whose glory will give off light is the same God who will be sovereign and get glory from whatever happens on April 18th. Which is so amazingly comforting and just awesome.

LONG Weekend

My goodness, I've done just about as much this weekend as I would in and entire week, which is pretty insane. So as I had said before, Laura and I went to Alyssa's house on Friday for her birthday, but we ended up not going to Mall of America since Laura wasn't going to be able to go. I was sort of expecting it to be a little ackward, but it wasn't, for the most part. We acctually had a conversation about homosexuals (I think because our Health teacher from middle school just officially announced that she was a homosexual) but it was kind of encouraging talking to her, because she didn't seem to talk about it like she was in favor of it. She almost seemed a bit uncomfortable with it, which was cool, because that isn't RIGHT. So I've been praying for her a lot lately, and really feel like I need to be talking with her (which is what Piper's sermon was on last night, and I'll talk about that part of my weekend, just not right now) but I'm not completely sure how. The thing is, she's heard the basic story of Jesus, so I'm not entirely sure where to start. And there's no possible way I could ever justly describe how amazing Christ is and what He did. So if you could be praying for that, and praying for Alyssa, that would pretty much be amazing. :)

So on Friday night, we stayed up until 3:00 in the morning (which was not smart, but they started watching a movie and if there's a movie on, there's no way I'll be able to fall asleep... especailly if I haven't seen it, which I hadn't) and I had to get up at 7:16 (I like setting my alarm for unusual times :) ). I acctually ended up waking up around 7:00 because Alyssa's younger siblings were playing Blues's Clues on the computer, and there computer was about 6 feet from where we were sleeping, and they were being quite loud about it. So anyways, my parents came to pick me up at 7:40 because I had Solo Ensemble. I played around 8:30ish and was SUPER nervous- to the point where I was shaking. I messed up so many times it was insane. One of my friends came in to listen because she was there to play with some other saxaphone players and had just finished and wanted to hear me play because she never had. Afterwards, she said that she thought it was really good, and my parents said that they thought it was good, but I thought that it was terrible. It turns out that Rachel (one of my friends who I've talked about with some of you), who played later in the day, checked what I got when she was there... and it was a two. Which is what I expected, but it was still kind of dissappointing. This is the first time I've gotten a two, so it's kind of a bummer. Especially because I thought I was pretty prepared... I just freaked out and got nervous. Oh well, I'll live.

Yesterday, the Van Goors, McDermotts, Murrays, Julie Webber, and our family headed out to Minneapolis around 10:00 because we were going to see the sports show. The women (besides Bekah, Hannah, and I) opted out and went shopping while everyone else went to the show. Bekah and I went off on our own after about half an hour because the men were walking too slow. After about half an hour by ourselves, we figured it might have been smart to bring one of the three cell phones in our group of people and went off looking for them. We pretty much spent the three hours looking for them and wishing we had money to buy ice cream. We all got back together at 4:00 and then found out that they did all of this really cool stuff that we never saw, so it was kind of a bummer, but oh well. After meeting back up with the ladies, we went over to Bethlehem for their Saturday night service. Piper preached basically about evangelizing. He spoke from 1 Peter 1:23 (I think?) to 2:3. I think my favorite point he made was when he was talking about how people talk too much when they're drunk. So then he went into how when we're learning about God and growing in our relationship with Him, we should keep wanting more and more and more until we're so drunk that we can't shut up and that we should constantly be talking about Him. There were A LOT of really great things said last night, but I think that was what stuck out most to me.

So that's pretty much my weekend in a nutshell (even though looking at how much I wrote... it's kind of a lot). And now I've got to go finish taking some pictures for Photography (since I haven't been home all weekend, and now have to do it today) and then I have to read 4 more chapters of Pride and Prejudice for English... but I don't really consider that homework because I love that book and probably would end up reading it today anyways. :) I hope you guys have a marvelous rest of your day of rest!