Lucky to be me.

I'm not well at the moment.  The usual teacher stuff: no voice, aching head, fevers and chills.  It catches us all at some point, and for me it was the weekend after a very busy week when I actually took a day off and went out for an adventure with my lovely husband. It was not the adventure that was my downfall, but the relaxing that went with it.  Once my body comes down from its state of tension and drive that accompanies high-stress deadlines - and this week contained 3 of them on consecutive days for various jobs  - it is vulnerable to any stray germs that are floating around.  Most teachers experience this in the first week of the holidays... push through to the end of term and then collapse.
But I am feeling lucky this week, because my illness has allowed me to be grateful for a few things:

1. I was only working at school for 3 days this week anyway, so I'm not disrupting the children's programme too much;
2. Last week my business partner and I decided to postpone a workshop that we were due to run this week, so when I felt ill on Tuesday this week I didn't feel obliged to go and run a full day workshop;
3. My boss at school rang me for a chat on Monday (a day that I don't teach) and was horrified at how I sounded, so when I phoned her the next day to tell her I wouldn't be in to teach on Wednesday she wasn't surprised;
4. My boss then showed how caring she is, and the strength of her new-found determination to show the staff explicitly how much they're valued - she rang me on Wednesday to tell me she had already got a relieving teacher in to the classroom for Thursday so I didn't try to come back to work too soon.  She would rather I took the extra day and got properly better;
5. I have found that my attention span is only about 30 minutes at the moment before I feel rubbish again, so i have been doing lots of little jobs, but nothing that involves high level concentration... but I have achieved so many of the little things I've been putting off for a while;
6. I have decided to be more gentle on myself.  I must take Sean Covey's advice and take time to
   "sharpen the saw"... so I've been painting this week - a new creative project but nothing that is pressurised.

So how lucky am I?  Who would have thought that a nasty cold could carry so many lessons?