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Date Night

/ Picking My Battles

Last Friday night Thing1 had a hot date, and the Big Guy had a gig playing guitar with his Québécois band at the local country store, so Thing2 and I decided to have Mommy-Thing2 evening.

We got to our favorite pub in Manchester, VT and, after ordering our drinks and appetizers, I pulled out my sketchbook and started sketch the candleholder.

Right on cue — as he does at every art museum or any time I’m sketching on the road — T2 asked if I had an extra journal. For once, i had thought to pack an extra, and the two of us sketched together in silence until our food arrived.

We came up with with wildly different pictures and spent the rest of the meal talking about art, architecture on Mars and art supplies.

It made for a different but quietly wonderful kind of date night.

Nine Minute Bonsai

/ Picking My Battles

A funny thing happened on the way to the buzzer. Herman the Hermit was determined to hide behind the bonsai so I decided to draw the tree instead. It was supposed to be a 3 minute doodle, but I kept hitting the snooze button until almost 10 minutes had gone by and Herman was still hiding. Then I remembered there were lots of other fish in the tank and restarted the timer from the beginning.

Oranges and Oranges

/ Picking My Battles


Sixteen year old Thing1 got into fitness in a big way last summer. He started working out like crazy. He spent the summer cutting hay (with a scythe) at his girlfriend’s house and jumping in ponds and rivers.

Just about the same time, he began having digestive issues that caused him to lose over 20 pounds in a few weeks — no mean feat for a kid who can seriously endanger the profit margin of any restaurant daring enough to put out an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Thanks to my job, we have excellent insurance, but it still took multiple visits to the ER and the regular doctor, along with a healthy dose of nepotism to finally find us the right specialist to hand us a diagnosis of Ulcerative Colitis.

At the time, all I could do was feel eternally grateful for our health plan and angry at a system that would have left Thing1 at sixteen without a colon if we hadn’t known somebody who knows somebody who could make something happen. I was angry for a while at the seeming apathy of the people in the system and not just on behalf of Thing1, but on behalf of the millions of Americans who have bad insurance or none at all. It left me wondering how many kids miss their potential because of lack of access to adequate care.

I still think about that every time we go for a checkup, wondering what we can do — aside from regularly calling our elected representatives — to change things.

Thing1 has clearly been thinking about it too, taking the ‘change the things I can’ approach to a life that now suddenly includes up to 12 pills a day.

At first when I saw his reaction, I thought I was worrying about oranges and he was thinking about apples. While I made my daily calls to my reps, he began researching his autoimmune disorder and adjusting his diet long with his workout. He googled and read. He experimented with different portions of protein and fiber, fruit and starches as he learned what his system would tolerate (incidentally coming up with a unified digestive theory that involves eating whole crates of clementines while simultaneously helping your parents run up a grocery bill to rival the national debt).

At the same time, we’ve started the time-honoured college search. T1 is a math fanatic, so we started looking at math/science schools, but he surprised us by announcing he wanted to study nutrition to help other kids who might be dealing with similar digestive issues. We’ve since signed him up for a course at the community college, and he’s even considering a blog with fitness and nutrition tips.

I finally realized T1 and I really were both thinking about oranges and oranges. We were just thinking up different ways to get to the good stuff under the skin.

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Minions in the Morning

/ Picking My Battles

The neon tetras are hilarious to watch sometimes.

I got a bonsai so Herman the Hermit could have a retreat for the more social fish, but the the tetras, a.k.a the Minions immediately claimed it for their daily 3PM game of tag.

Herman got sick of the ruckus and gave up the shady spot under the bonsai to spend more quality time with the thinker girl.

Perfectly Still

/ Picking My Battles

A few months ago, wanting to improve my paintings and realize a dream I’d had since high school, I began looking for an affordable art school.  I wanted to improve my drawings, learn more about techniques and be in a community of other emerging artists. 

If you’ve ever looked for  art schools, however, you’ll know what I mean when I say that the word ‘affordable’ is REALLY subjective, and, realizing that getting a BFA or MFA would require mortgaging all my vital organs to pay for it, began designing my own MFA in illustration.  I looked at the curricula for a number of schools and set about finding inexpensive workshops that paralleled them as closely as possible, settling on an online classical drawing course.

The first part of the course focused on breaking bad habits — holding the pencil wrong, starting with the wrong subjects — and starting new, good habits. Ironically, the affordable drawing course had a fairly pricey equipment list. Wanting to follow it as closely as possible, however, I went online an ordered everything except the $250 easel. And then I waited.

And I waited.

I waited for the stuff to arrive. I waited for the next lessons on using it properly. 

And I didn’t draw a thing. 

Not a cartoon.

Not a single still life or even an recklessly abandoned landscape.  Even my book layout slowed to a crawl.

My art — and with it — my blog was perfectly still.

A friend pointed it out to me: “Your blog is static. You’re only posting every few weeks.”  And I wanted to add that the posts were uninspired because I was uninspired.  I began telling myself the posts were so infrequent because it took too long to illustrate them the way I wanted.

Then a friend invited me to test out a watercolor tutorial she had developed for an educational website.  The video turned out to be a fun review of basic skills, but what stuck with me was a phrase she kept repeating: “Be gentle with yourself.”

I  look at other tutorials on the site and noticed that, other tutors — most of them working illustrators that I want to be — all ambassadors of the “Be Gentle With Yourself” philosophy.  They were also doing was something I wasn’t anymore. 

They were drawing everyday.

My favorite video was a short segment called the “Three Minute Sketching Challenge.”  Inspired the Hundred Days of Sketching project, it advocated timed drawings that guaranteed an imperfect result.  It also guaranteed, however, that there would be a result.

I turned to my fish tank and set the timer. My guppy, Oscar seemed to know he was being drawn because he chose those exact three minutes to do his daily race around the fake bonzai plant, but three minutes later I had a fishy doodle.

Four minutes after that, it was colored in.

Five minutes later, I dropped the ‘serious’ drawing class and subscribed to the way cheaper site .

I did a few dozen timed doodles, cursing when the alarm clock announced it was time for my day job.

Nothing I’ve produced in the last few days is remotely serious. It’s miles away from perfect. I may chase perfect and sign up for a ‘serious’ art class again someday, but, for now, I’m too busy drawing.

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Keeping Score

/ Picking My Battles


Around our house, Little League starts a couple weeks before the first practice and, with it, the same exact conversation:

Thing2: “Do I have to play?

Interchangeable parent: “yes”

Thing2: “I hate baseball. (Insert ad nausea exclamations as to why we should not sign up for baseball)”.

And just as I’m looking for the return receipts for the new gear after assuring Thing2 for the umpteenth time that “you love baseball,” something great happens.

Sunday’s something great happened when I drove Thing1 to the rec park for around the free golf course. Ten-year-old Thing2 insisted on going to join me for a walk around the trail, and I said yes, knowing I’d be abandoned for the playground before the end of the first lap on the trail.

We didn’t even finish the first half before Thing2 noticed a classmate and his dad engaged in an impromptu batting practice at the baseball diamond. The friend’s dad, who happens to be this year’s coach, invited him to stay and hit a few, and gave me a few minutes of quiet walking time.

Twenty minutes later, coach and classmate were ready to head home for Sunday dinner. Thing2 helped stow the equipment as he proclaimed his anticipation of the next night’s official practice.

I corralled him back to the trail so we could drag Thing1 from the golf course.

“I hit 30 pitches,” Thing2 told me as he skipped to the last putting green. “That would be a ton of runs!”

 T2 was still calculating his imaginary score when Thing1 came into view.  We arrived to see him sink his last putt and pound the air with his fist in the universal signal of victory.  

The boys had scored big, but I was about to get an unexpected win.

We got to the car, Thing2 waved to his friend across the parking lot. Then he turned to me and said, “Man, I can’t wait for baseball practice tomorrow!”

Score!

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Just a Moment

/ Picking My Battles

Without asking, he brushed a finger over her gossamer wings.

A bazillion years ago when I was a kid, a boy who was more than old enough to know better touched me in a way that changed me forever.

The change didn’t happen overnight. It took years for the confusion, guilt, shame, and secrecy to build walls and to paint my own mental picture of Dorian Gray. In my mind for many years, I was an ugly little troll, and I did not want to be.

I was thinking of this the other day as I was sketching a rough layout of a similar moment in my next book, The Truth About Trolls, when everything changes for the main character, Elly. That moment is a big reason why I wrote the story. It was to acknowledge that sometimes things happen, even to children, that they can’t control and that change them.  Even though that moment in the story is told in a way that is comprehensible and accessible to young children, I knew the rough sketch was on the right track because I started to cry as I drew the hand of a brash boy reaching to touch the wing of a fairy.

When I met my husband, a.k.a. The Big Guy, my mental picture changed. He was the first man who knew me and my secrets and still told me I was beautiful. Twenty years later I still see a very round troll when I look in the mirror, and he still tells me I’m beautiful. The only difference is that years of  loving the Big Guy, 16-year-old Thing1 and 10-year-old Thing2 has helped me see that trolls can indeed be beautiful.

That is the next part of the book. Sometimes things happen and they do change us, even against our wills. But too often those changes cause guilt or shame, and we can begin taking unflattering mental selfies. What Elly discovers, and what I’m hoping children will glean, is that even if you are not the same person you were, those changes don’t make you any less valuable or beautiful, and, in time, you can come out stronger.

Trolling

/ Picking My Battles

“The worst tale is that trolls have no magic…”

In between working on getting art supplies to future artists and taking a drawing course to improve my skills a bit, I’ve been working on the layout for “The Truth about Trolls”. The story is about finding your inner beauty by recognizing the inner strength that comes from surviving loss or heartbreak.

DrawPaintCreate has raised over $1500 in its first week, and will be delivering art kits to refugee children in Albany New York in the next week or so. I’m also in contact with the Department of Children and Families in Bennington Vermont and I’m working to
assemble kits for an additional 88 children that they serve.

DCF was kind enough to provide the ages of the children so we can tailor the kits a bit for safety. I had a chance to peruse their site and found the site of an agency that helps place children with foster families and with forever families. The site has pictures of smiling faces that are impossible not to fall in love with and stories make you to want to wrap each and every kid in unconditional love and shelter until they’re ready to fly the coop.

You can’t, of course. You can give as much help as possible, but there will always be another story that tugs at the heart– as the stories should.

The smiling faces however, have kept me on task with the drawings for “The Truth about Trolls.”. They’re reminders that resilient inner beauty is more than just a fairy tale.

 

No Blue Mondays

/ Picking My Battles

Monday is my new favorite day of the week. Between sales and outright donations, almost $400 was raised for DrawPaintCreate, and I was able to order supplies for 20 kits, thanks to a friend who helped find a few websites that sell art supplies wholesale.

I want to say a huge thank you to everyone for your generosity.  I have even had local people ask if they could help assemble the kits, and I’m thinking a ‘Santa in Spring’ party may be in order.

Yup, Monday is a good day.