Life

Wow it's been quite a while since I posted. Just busy with life I suppose. Facebook has stolen me away a tiny bit, too (writing isn't necessarily my favorite). Never quite caught the Twitter bug. I have enough things stealing my time. I am posting today because I am trying to reclaim some of my stolen time. This past month, after celebrating my birthday, I discovered a book that has been helping me to refocus my energy on my true passion, being creative. The book is called The Artistic Mother by Shona Cole. It's definitely helping me to reevaluate how I spend my "free" time. I too often waste time watching too much TV or getting lost in the internet. I then wonder where all my time goes. The book includes 12 weeks of fun "workshops" to help focus and use some of my "free" time daily to be creative. I'm between the 1st and 2nd week of projects. Just recently, I discovered a group of women also working through the book trying to balance life, motherhood, and being artistic. The group was started by Trudy Callan and you can learn more about the group and Trudy here. I've decided to join the group so I can meet more artsy moms and be kept accountable in my pursuit of more art and happy in my life. So far I've found more time to spend in my craft room daily, but I've had difficulty planning ahead and staying up on the daily workshop suggestions. I'm loving the projects (in fact I can't wait to start week 4's project, my artistic vision statement banner) and work on them happily. But I've been quite scattered with the rest of the goals (poetry, photography, research, etc.).

Life distractions, both happy and sad, have made me more scattered these past couple weeks. For instance, my best friend asked me to make a piece of art for her that I really enjoyed doing. But I've also been working on some art just to help me with the pain involved in losing a loved one. My grandpa went in for back surgery March 22 and things have gone horribly wrong since then. My grandpa is 82 and has lived a wonderful life, but all of this was still unexpected. He has not passed away, but it looks like that is in the near future. It has been quite sad and painful for me and my family. Fortunately, art has been helping me some. I hope to take time to scrapbook a lot of the memories of my grandpa that are surrounding me these days.