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Zen and the Art of Painting a Cardboard Snowy Village
Yesterday Bug took a nap early and woke up about 3pm with nothing particularly special planned by me to keep her busy. (Did I just write a sentence backwards? I do that all the time. But I can’t re-order it for the life of me so I guess it will just have to stay that way.) So you know what that means. It’s not time to cook dinner yet, we have no business to take care of (i.e., errands, grocery-shopping, etc.) and it’s a bit chilly for the park or the beach so it must be CRAFT TIME! Break it down!
Except 3 o’clock is a bit late to be starting on a craft project in the wintertime. Winter days are so short! Man! It seems like summer lasted forever and we were sweating constantly and now FINALLY it’s winter and we can do stuff and there’s next-to-no daylight time to get anything done. Short days are cramping my style. Moan, complain, bitch, whine…
Halfway in we were already losing daylight and getting paint on our coat sleeves because it was chilly and for some stupid reason we do not have painting coats. And there is no way I’m moving a painting craft indoors no matter how polluted my carpet already is. I have some standards.
We worked fast and furious and unfortunately it showed. Good thing I’m not a perfectionist!
It’s good not to be a perfectionist when you have a constant helper like I do. Sometimes I have to go to my zen happy place so I don’t lose it when she paints something the wrong way and mucks up my grand vision. She is so patient with me though.
I do lose it sometimes. I mean, I don’t yell or anything terrible but I get a bit irritated and sharp with her when she paints the house color on top of where I just painted the roof color. So when she says something like, “Mommy, you make me afraid I’m going to paint it wrong,” it just slaps me in the face because why am I doing this craft anyway? Aren’t these activities for her? There should be no fear in crafting.
I have a long way to go in the patience department. I’m just glad God gave me a such patient kid. She’s way more patient with me than I am with her.
In the end her every-which-way strokes did not really mess anything up. It was me hurrying that messed it up. I tried to add some shading to the snowy slopes and used a dark color instead of a light color which is completely backwards to what it would be in real life. I had a vision of painting some round shady hills like this painting (that I love so much) but with snow instead of meadows but I rushed through it and was sloppy.
You guys don’t really need to know all this behind the scenes stuff…it was a fun project and who cares where my expectations were right?
We added some “snow” and that made everything better. I’m so glad I stocked up on the industrial-size bottle of glitter. It’s totally been worth whatever I paid for it.
I like this photo Bug took of me lugging my giant craft box up the stairs. She put a nice big fingerprint on the lens (which is why I have a waterproof/kidproof camera) which worked as a nice softening filter. You should try it sometime. I feel like I’m back in the seventies instead of just some dork wearing a hat that is not all that flattering.
So that’s that. A craft and a lesson (for me, hah!). Now what am I going to do with this awful thing? Anybody want me to mail it to you? I’m kidding. Sort of. I’m keeping the kid.
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Thanksgiving 09: The year Toby made the gravy.
Thanksgiving flew by and I didn’t take any photos of the kids! Shame on me. We had thanksgiving at Bethany’s this year. It was small and sweet. The funny thing is I actually found myself being mildly annoyed that I had to help out in the kitchen and stuff instead of just spending the day playing on my laptop and drinking coffee while Bethany baked something. I’m so spoiled when I go to Bethany’s. But it was really nice to share all the fun of staying at Bethany’s with my mom and dad and Toby.
Toby made a guest-star appearance in the kitchen to make his own version of gravy this year. I’ve written before how gravy is a thorn in my side when it comes to cooking and how Toby thinks it’s food of the gods and therefore I should learn the art so that I can be the best wife ever. I say phoey on that. Gravy Schmavy.
We decided to let Mr. Gravy Expert try his own hand in the kitchen instead of just spouting off about it for a change. Let me just say it was very entertaining. I have no idea what he did but it involved onions and a lot of whipping and then the gravy kept growing and growing so that eventually he had to move the whole mess into a much bigger pot. In the end, we had enough gravy to freeze and eat all year long. That may have been his motive all along since I’ve failed him so miserably.
It wasn’t exactly the best gravy I ever tasted but it wasn’t bad. It looked pretty anyway. It will however make a great defense argument for the next time he launches into his great speech on how of grease molecules glom onto flour molecules (Or was it the other way around? Can you tell I’ve heard this rant about a million times and that I make a habit of tuning it out?).
Toby felt bad about his great gravy experiment in the end but I thought the whole debacle was fantastic. There is nothing better than a little kitchen entertainment that involves the whole family. I prefer that to drunken drama any day.
