Ouch.

I woke up happy yesterday morning.
Really happy.

I wasn't thinking about homicidal snow storms or stressing over the approaching yearbook deadline. Instead I was lying in a nice warm bed in my childhood home, thinking about all of the many blissful blessings that had been bountifully bestowed upon me over the last few weeks. I was content to lounge lazily, pondering the perfectness of this vacation, until I heard my mother's voice come drifting up to my room, gently announcing breakfast. The thought of hot chocolate and buttery toast propelled me out of bed and towards the staircase that led down to the kitchen. It was then, however, that the unfortunate combination of socks, carpeted stairs, and gravity propelled me down the stairs and towards the kitchen in a much less pleasant manner.

I fell down the stairs.

These stairs.
Various thoughts flashed through my mind during my unintentional avalanche impersonation. Many of those thoughts are not exactly appropriate to post on this blog considering my readership includes my mother, several seventh graders, those seventh grader's mothers, and my relief society president. But lucky for me (and for everyone else within ear-shot) I didn't have enough breath during or after my tumble to actually vocalize any of those particular thoughts.
And a few other thoughts did manage to sneak in between the cuss words, cuss phrases, and cuss compound-complex sentences.

My life didn't flash before my eyes, but my lesson plans for the upcoming quarter did, and somewhere between my third and sixth bounce I was wondering if my friend Zealanda would mind being my long-term sub while I spent the next few months in traction.

At some point the thought, "This is going to make a great blog post!" may have crossed my mind, but after hearing a very loud "crack" during my last bounce, I distinctly recall making a conscious decision to start thinking about the long-term-care section of my insurance policy. Most of my thoughts immediately after my impromptu humpty-dumpty impersonation centered on trying to breathe in a way that would not result in shooting pains through my upper body, but eventually the thoughts "priesthood blessing" and "doctor" wormed their way into my consciousness.

A few hours later I made it home from the doctor's office with a cracked tail bone, some bruised ribs, and a purse full of pain killers. My first order of business (after the pain killers started to kick in) was to take pictures of the scene of the accident for a vicodin-fueled blog post that I honestly thought was the most insightful and entertaining piece of literature that I had ever composed. I but "wrote" the post in my head as I rode to Utah with my family, but by the time I was able to get to my computer, all traces of my literary masterpiece had disappeared. In their place: an intense desire for Cheetos and root beer. But because I am a "prescription-bottle-half-full" kind of gal, I am looking on the bright side of the staircase and counting my blessings (and counting my pain pills) . Things could have been much, much worse but they weren't. And now I have a great subject for the example I am going to write for the kidlet's "How I spent my Christmas vacation" poem assignment. As soon as I find a few more words that rhyme with "backside" and "minor internal injuries" I am going to get back to enjoying the last few days of my break... pun intended.