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Here is the next spread from our book:
Left side is a penguin David traced last year that he loves. And the right side is about the first time he had Smarties (on Halloween) and how much he liked them. More next time. David’s Book of Good Memories is a bi-weekly project for 2012 with my seven-year-old son David. You can read more about it here.
I am grateful to say that things are getting better. Slowly but steadily. And I am working hard to get back into my routines, keep my spirits up and move forward. The kids are doing great and so is Jake. I promise I will start writing more detailed weekly updates soon again but for now, keeping it short and sweet and letting the photos speak. with that, here are some highlights from last week: Nathaniel really likes me to take photos lately and will tell me to take a picture often.
and then pose for me.
paper airplanes are still big here. Making, coloring, and throwing them.
I love this shot but can’t really explain why.
i love how Nathaniel has to imitate all David does so now he gets his own Wii remote (without batteries) so he can “play” too.
happy face!
of course, he plays with airplanes too!
I was getting my hair done last Sunday night so Jake and David had their own “family night” playing monopoly.
Nathaniel had no school all week and despite a low grade fever all weeklong, he spent a lot of time drawing and then coming over to show me his drawings.
he’s showing me specific colors here. (or trying to.)
the high point of the week was the whoopie cushion Jake brought home.
There was much laughter.
and hours of enjoyment.
Nathaniel is also really picky about what he wears recently. He likes polo shirts with buttons and the pants with zippers and buttons. Nothing but fancy for my boy.
I got David a limited edition Lego Moleskine and he loves writing in it and drawing in it.
Since Jake was leaving town we took family shots early this week and I love getting one of just my boys. (Nathaniel had just woken up from his nap.)
and love tickle-time of course!
I played “What doesn’t kill you” this week a few times and this is what Nathaniel likes to do while he listens. Cracks me up.
David reading his school book. This one was about Alexander Graham Bell. He’s really into nonfiction and science and space lately.
And here’s Nathaniel sticking crayons into an empty thread spool. Yes, they got stuck in there, of course.
The boys colored on Thursday while I worked and Jake was gone. Mommy cannot tolerate noise so we do quieter activities when it’s just me around.
We turned the play table’s top yesterday so the kids could build a city. You can’t really see it here, I have to take another shot.
and just at bedtime, one of David’s top teeth finally fell off. Not the super-crooked one but the other one. Now he has two teeth missing on top and two on the bottom. Very soon the crooked one will fall too and he’ll have almost no front teeth, my boy!
and here we go. Here’s to hoping things still keep getting better. Weekly Diary is a project for 2012. You can read more about it here. Page fourteen:
This is the last of the collages inspired by Body Restoration. This lesson was about writing a letter to our old self and then cutting it up and burying it and then letting her go. I did this exercise and it was incredibly powerful for me so I wanted to make sure to remember it. The collage elements are by Melody Ross. more next week. Journey into Collage is a project for 2012. You can read more about it here. Since I completely got lost in my Savor Project tonight and forgot to type up a post, I figured I might as well catch up on posting these. I am all caught up in both classes but just haven’t had a chance to post the photos. So here is February. I am taking two year-long classes at Big Picture Classes this year. I am pretty sure you must have heard of both. Even though these are not amazing, I still thought it would be fun to post my progress each month. If for no other reason than to record things. Here are my OLW pages for February: the pockets with photos page:
And then I used two blow up pages for the two sets of people who mean the most in my life. My kids:
and my husband:
and there we go. I actually typed up the journaling later and printed it on a transparency that I slipped into the sleeve but I love how it worked out. And then here’s the Move More, Eat Well page for February:
And here we go. That’s where we are now. I will post a March update later this month. Here are some more pages I did:
The full text reads: Spread your wings and soar high. And here’s the next page:
The full text reads: take time to snuggle. Well here we go. More coming next week. I am creating multiple art journaling pages a week for now. You can read more about this project here. This set uses the Fabriano Roma papers.
Now that I am healing a little more each day (not that I want to jinx it), I wanted to share a little bit about what I did with my schedule when things got a bit crazy and how I am recovering. I’ve written about my notebooks and my schedule before and while both of them get tweaked and updated regularly, I still stick to most of what’s outlined there. I still use my notebooks and have daily, weekly, monthly plans that I follow regularly. Before the chaos at work began, I was doing these:
I know this looks like a lot but I was able to manage it relatively well on my regular schedule. Each of these tasks takes a small amount of time and you can see on my schedule that I work on them early morning and late nights. And then catch up on the weekends. But then I got the problem at work and started working pretty much around the clock. At first, I was still at home and tried to continue doing some of these (like sketching and strength exercises) but then things got harder. I started going in to work and coming home late enough to go right to sleep so I could wake up, make the lunches, get the kids off to school and go back into work. And I didn’t sleep or eat much during that time. So I made an executive decision to stop doing everything on my list except a few. Here are the exceptions and why I chose them: I continued to run each morning. That’s my non-negotiable and I haven’t gone a day without it since October 2, 2010 and pretty much nothing is going to stand in my way. After about a week, I was feeling really weak and I was having a really hard time running the whole distance. At first, I lowered it to 2 miles but another week in, I decided I would run one mile each morning. This meant my exercise was done in 10 minutes and I had no excuse not to do it and I could still keep up the habit of doing it daily. Once I started working at home again, I went back up to 2.5 miles and now that we’re in April, I’m running 2.6 miles every morning. We still took weekly family photos. Those photos make me happy and it’s one of the few things I couldn’t make up for later. Time passes and I wanted to make sure I got the photos. We generally do these on Friday afternoon but for the weeks where I was at work, we did them Saturday morning and I am very grateful I didn’t skip this tradition. I also did the weekend updates on the blog because I have family who comes to look at them and I didn’t want to have to miss it and then have to make up for it by going through 3-weeks’ worth of photos. I also continued The Savor Project. I took it super-simple but I still did it. This is the kind of project that builds on itself and I didn’t want to skip if I didn’t have to. Since Jake and I were still taking photos, I had stories to tell. I just picked my stories, printed the photos and kept things really simple. I spent about 1-2 hours on the weekend on this project. One of the things I gave up really reluctantly was sketching. I have come to truly cherish my sketching time and hadn’t missed a day since January 2 so I felt bad but once I was going in to work, I knew it had to go. But I did continue doing them during the weekend and whenever else I could. As soon as I was back at home, I picked it right back up. I really enjoy this project so much. I continued the art/craft posts in the blog because most of them were already scheduled and I just had to add a few that I was already doing. It also meant that there were things to read each day for the people who’ve been kind enough to visit me regularly. I did give up the thoughts posts just cause I didn’t want to wing them and they take time to put together. Time I didn’t have. Everything else was put on hold. I don’t remember if I did any art during this time (besides the occasional sketching) but certainly nothing noteworthy. I stopped doing the strength exercises, meditation, journaling, reading to david, and all other odds and ends I spent my free time on. I didn’t surf at all. I replied to almost no emails and no comments. I canceled all appointments that were on my calendar. Whenever I did choose to take some downtime, I snuggled with family or read a book. So there you go. I thought it might help to explain some of my thinking so that you can see examples of how to adjust your own schedule as a specific deadline puts pressure on your time. I basically held on to three categories of items: nonnegotiable, overwhelming joy and compounding. Looking back, I think it would have been good to take the time to journal or meditate (or both) but I didn’t feel capable of either at the time. In fact, it took me another week after I was home to begin journaling again. Once I was home, I still took it a bit easy. I gave myself three days to continue on the lighter schedule and then slowly added things back in. At this point, I am almost back to my full, regular schedule. Some days are still a struggle but I am much more forgiving on myself than I was before. I hope this helps for any of you live relatively structured like I do and who struggle with occasional time crunches. I also have two more notes: 1. Thank you so much for all your kind words over the last few weeks. I am touched beyond words. I appreciate every single word, advice, hug, sentiment more than you will ever know. Thank you for continuing to come visit and still leave comments. I promise I will start responding again and if you’ve left me a comment with a question that went unanswered, please please ask again so I can see it and reply. 2. I am putting together a little FAQ on sketching and one on art journaling. Do you have any questions you’d like me to answer? And here’s the spread for week twelve (sorry photos are not great quality, haven’t figured out how to photograph these well still.):
here’s a closer up of the left side:
The first story here is about Nathaniel putting legos together following directions and then calling daddy for help. Then about David’s pink eye and my rough time at work. And here’s the right side:
The first one is about the first time Nathaniel told me he loved me all on his own (not as a response to my saying i love him). The second one is about David’s front teeth that are all crooked and about to fall off. And then the last story is about Nathaniel and how good he is about finding joy in the smallest things. Since I didn’t do so much art this week, like last week, I took some of our family photos and just added them along the bottom. So there we go. So far, so good. Still enjoying this project a lot. Happy Savoring. The Savor Project was supposed to be a weekly project for 2012. You can read about my setup here.
I chose Relic because of an online book club. I don’t usually read mysteries so it was a nice change of pace. And it was a quick, engrossing read most of the way through. I cannot put my finger on why but it left me uninspired for some reason. I didn’t feel happy or clear when the ending came. There’s a big twist towards the end and I didn’t care for that either. Having said that, I did enjoy reading the book while I was reading it so I don’t want it to sound all bad. It was a fast, interesting and engrossing read. I’d recommend it if that’s what you’re looking for.
Recently, I was thinking about my college days. One of the most magical things about being in college is that you’re surrounded by people who’re exactly your age and in the same stage of their life as you are. And you’re independent and making your own decisions. You get to stay up all night or ditch class or take extra classes or go dancing all night. The decisions are yours. It’s an extreme example of finding yourself and being given all the room to do so while others around you are doing exactly the same thing. It’s intense. You might not be surprised to find out that I worked pretty hard through college. In the four years I was there, I got both my undergraduate degree and my graduate one, and I had a minor in Art. I also couldn’t believe I could take any class I wanted so I took a lot of random courses. So college wasn’t all fun and games for me. But I still remember having so much time. Making so many friends. Like anything else there, friendships in college were intense too. You meet someone, you talk for hours. And then the next day you talk all day again. About nothing. About everything. I remember meeting people and then just spending hours talking to them. Maybe this is why the friends you make there tend to stick with you. I recently had coffee with someone I really liked. I’d never really talked to this person one on one before and during the coffee, it became really apparent to me that we could talk for a long long time before we ran out of things to share. But, alas. She has kids, and so do I. Husbands. Job. Life. The chance that we will get to spend hours and hours to chat is pretty close to slim. This is why I thought about college. That period when I could really dive deep into my friendships with people. When it comes to connecting, I am not a breadth person. I might have a bunch of acquaintances but I really prefer to have few, deep friends. So having a large quantity of quality time together is essential. And I am not sure exactly how to accomplish that in my current stage of life. When I am chatting with someone and I can tell that if only we spent more time together, dove deeper, were less worried about being cordial, could get right to the authenticity, we could really connect. Then I feel this urge to do something about it. I wish I could just pause the clock and sit there with that person and chat. Like I used to in college. Where all the urgencies of everything else falls away. Where time feels infinite. (Even though it never is.) But, instead, I give her a hug and tell her I hope we can have coffee again soon. (knowing full well it might be months before “soon” comes.) I know it’s just a stage of life. There will be other periods when my kids are out of the house or when I am retired where I have more time to connect. And I know I am lucky to have a husband who is my best friend. But I still wish I could find a way to connect more deeply now. I miss the intensity of college. But I don’t seem to have any ideas on how to make it happen. I just know I want it. Here are the sketches from last week: Sunday:
Monday:
Tuesday:
Wednesday:
Thursday:
Friday:
Saturday:
that’s it for this week. Daily Sketching is a weekly project for 2012. You can see a detailed post on my steps here.
This weekend I happened upon this old post and stopped to read all the things I’d promised to myself. Even though I am definitely working on healing, I’ve still been having a real tough time recovering. So, looking at the list, these words struck me:
Here’s the thing: it’s easy to stick to all these promises, to be happy and to savor and to have a positive perspective when life is good. It’s easy to say I will forgive myself when I don’t have anything to forgive myself for. It’s during these tough times that all this gets put to the test. It’s during those times that I have to rise up to the challenge of keeping these promises. But, yet, I’ve been having a hard time doing so. Having a hard time letting things go. Paying attention to the good and not letting the bad cast a shadow on my wonderful life. And so I came back to these and read them again and again and again until they sunk in. I went through my lists here and picked a bunch of the good items. I put on some loud music. I kissed my kids. I took a walk with my family. I did art. And I worked. I got stuff done. I am trying to move forward. To go back to the promises I made myself. I still believe in every one of these promises. I want to go where the peace is. I want to turn to good things. I want to pay extra attention to the good. There’s so much good in my life. My husband has been an angel through all this. I cannot even express the words of gratitude I feel for him. I didn’t think I could love him more but I was wrong. I love him so much more and feel so grateful that it hurts. And I owe it to him and to my kids and to my good life to pay attention. It is times like this that test my resolve. That really show me whether I can do it. And I want to prove to myself that I can. If it means I have to listen to loud music nonstop for a while, so be it! As I was pondering all this last weekend, I was visiting one of my favorite art journalers, iHanna, and it was as if she was thinking of me when she shared this quote:
Yes. Here’s to hoping I can truly be done with each day and can keep my promises and rise to meet my wonderful life. This layout is for Write.Click.Scrapbook’s April Gallery. The theme is to scrap “I grateful for …”.
Journaling Reads: Details:
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