Our Little Clone

Of Ernie, that is...

We (meaning Ernie) gave the little tyke a haircut over the weekend, and I am now thoroughly convinced that I was merely an incubator. Fortunately Dad is a good looking guy, or that could be a bummer for little Asher...

But here he is both posing with Daddy-O, and doing his Kilroy impression (while scoping the counter for a cookie).




Hence the chocolate smears on his face.

So I'm in the home stretch for the upcoming show at Dragonfly... here is a sample of what has been brewing in the ole' studio. I'll keep y'all posted on the opening details, and attempt to have all of that info updated in good order on the website pre-event as well. I'm also installing the new mural at the KidZone Museum in Truckee starting next week; it should be quite alot of fun. I'll take some pictures as it develops and let you see what's going on there.... African theme, lots of lions and tigers and Okapies, oh my.

Back to painting...

OK OK, It's been a loooong time...

Yep, our little rugrat has officially moved on from belly-button acknowledgement to reciting Shakespeare and fractal design... well, maybe not exactly, but he is certainly a talkative little bird.

He's using full sentences (with subjective nouns, verbs, descriptive words, the whole deal), and when his words fail him he chooses randomly between A. Throwing a fit; B. Pulling on my pant leg to drag me to whatever he wants me to see, retrieve, etc; or C. problem solving his way through it (like going and getting his little step stool to try to reach something. The wheel seems heavily weighted towards A at this point, but hey, he's only 20 months old... I'll cut him some slack. If he's still throwing fits at 10, maybe we should rethink things.

This is my second attempt at publishing this morning, so I hope it works. Seem to be having trouble with images so I'll try text first.

Cross our collective fingers...

Belly Belly!

So when I ask Asher where his belly button is...




Oh, he's so smart!

Lightning McAsh

So the wee man had his first taste o' takin' the wheel this past weekend, and I think he likes it...

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.