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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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Deep thoughts from the lid of a sour cream container…
I’ve been thinking about friendship lately. I was peeling open a container of sour cream the other day and it had one of those cliché sayings on it like, “Never let a small disagreement ruin a great friendship.” I’ve heard sayings like that a thousand times but for some reason seeing it on the foil wrapping of a sour cream container stopped me short.
One minute I was thinking about topping a burrito and the next I was a thousand miles away wondering about that one friendship that I lost a long long time ago just because of some stupid silly thing…and now it’s been so long and we’ve both gone such separate ways there is no way I’ll ever get that friendship back.
How dare you bring me down like that you silly sour cream container!
But it did make me think of another friendship I have. I know this girl down the street from my house. I wrote about her once before in that sponsored ice cream post. Just a blip. Her name is Deb and she’s an artist. We met because I was taking Bug on one of our taking-forever-going-nowhere meandering walks down the alley behind our house and Deb was outside her garage painting a colossal canvas by dripping green watercolor paint down it over some strings that she had tied strategically in the shape of leaf membranes. It’s amazing art. I wish she had a website I could link.
Anyway for some reason, maybe because Bug is such a great ice breaker, we got to talking and next thing you know we are fast friends who go on walks on the beach at least once a month. We’d go more often but we both have crazy schedules and we both travel so much we are away from home more than we are home. Funny how life is that way.
Deb isn’t the friend that I lost years ago but I was thinking about her because over the last few months I had called her four times and she never returned my calls. Me being me, who worries about everything and thinks everything is my fault, I thought it might be because the last time she called me I was in the middle of something and I was completely distracted. I have no idea what I said on that phone call but what if I had said something that had offended her!! GASP! Maybe I’m that annoying mom who talks on and on about her kid (Deb doesn’t have kids) and she’s just trying to lose me as a friend?!! Drama drama…etc.
It’s silly that I should ever worry about anything like that because Deb is such a happy-go-lucky sweet sort of girl and she loves Bug. She’s not the type to blow you off. She’s just busy. Four phone calls is a lot of phone calls for her not to return but she’s never ever given me a reason to think she is ignoring me before.
I had a choice. I could just keep my worries to myself and let time go by, possibly even years because I really really don’t want to bug her OR I could write her a quick email and just ask her if I was bugging her. It was a scary thing to do for me to do. Normally I wouldn’t do it. I hate to be annoying but that sour cream container got me thinking!!!
So I emailed her and guess what? I had been calling her work number and not her home number. Doh!!! She’s been super busy and somehow my four messages had got lost in between messages from her many clients!! It turns out she did want to get together with me and we had an amazing time catching up the other day. Our one hour walk on the beach turned into three hours and it just made me so thankful that for once I listened to a cliché on the lid of a sour cream container and took the risk of being that annoying friend who just won’t go away.
Because I don’t want to go away.