How Sara Got Her Groove Back

So last weekend was my very first Arttour... an open studio tour in which 40 local artists participated. It was self-guided and open to the public, and at least 125-150 people wandered through my working spaces over the three days it ran.

I have to say, it felt like a success...

I sold work, made contacts for commissions, had people reserve some of the in-progress works on the easels, and generally relished the opportunity to meet some really interesting people and receive alot of wonderful feedback. All in all it was a good way to feel a bit of my artistic mojo again, and re-introduce myself to some of those aspects of my creative self that have spent much more time on the shelf than finding their way to canvas over the past year.





It is a brave new world for this little painter... one in which my heart is currently only two feet tall and toddles around outside my body clutching a pooh bear doll, has an older sis, a Dad, and a whole slew of things I never saw coming... and the "first child" of my own creative life has had to transform and evolve to accommodate and incorporate this new reality.

As is to be expected, for awhile now I've been struggling to balance the combined experiences of absolute love and profound loss, boundless inspiration and massive new time constraints, the desire for more time for myself and my work coupled with the grief of giving up any precious moments with him....

I truly believe that carving out significant ways of nurturing that "first child" will ultimately make me a much more balanced and therefore better mother to my baby boy; it just doesn't make it any easier to leave him in daycare for the day and miss all those fabulous little learnings and "lightbulb moments". One of the profoundly unfair dilemmas of life, but it's ok.

So I guess it's not really "getting my groove back", as much as it is discovering a new groove.

The Itchy Scratchy Show

Poor little punkin.... he had a rather nasty allergic reaction to a mere fragment of a cashew today.





So there he was toddling around the doc's office, one giant hive, not quite sure what to do with himself but whimper and scratch. I could do nothing but sit on the floor and whimper with him and feel powerless, while gnashing my teeth at our lengthy wait to be seen (so as to vent my protective but powerless Mommy spleen).

Someone shared a quote with me recently which I can not recall in its exact incarnation, but basically says this:
that becoming a parent means one must be prepared to accept that from now on your heart will be walking around outside your body...
and today mine had a terrible rash.

I am currently very grateful to Benadryl for healing my heart's itchy welts.