A Mindful Life

Contentment costs little these days. I wish I had the time and energy to begin more ambitious projects (I drool over Leah’s daily output), but I’m also really pleased with what I’m doing this year. Some day, soon enough, I’ll make big messes again.

This is how I sometimes amuse my Little Eclaire in the late afternoon before daddy comes home. She knows and can say the names of all these things except the purple fuzzy creature.

I woke up feeling icky and got worse. A gastrointestinal thing. Husband stayed home and I slept most of the day. Claire refuses to take milk from anyone else but me and only in a bottle still. So this afternoon there were storms of tantrums, because I wasn’t available. I guess we need to get serious about the switch to sippy cups and eliminate the bottles (she drinks water out of sippy cups). My reason for hesitating until now has been: she won’t eat yogurt, cheese, cottage cheese, or ice cream, so milk is her only dairy and significant source of calcium. She rarely eats meat of any kind and refuses eggs and tofu; thus milk is her protein source. She is still underweight for her age. She eats a lot of fruit, veggies, and bread and cereals, but won’t eat pasta. She is an active child, always walking, climbing, dancing, etc. So I’ve continued to give her a bottle and not restrict the amount. I recently weighed her (last week), and in two months she only gained 12 ounces. She is still shy of 19 pounds. (And believe me, I’m getting real tired of all the comments on how small she is. How ironic that in about 10 years she will feel tremendous pressure to weigh less and may obsess about extra weight!)

I hope I feel better tomorrow. It’s no fun for any of us when I’m sick.

I played with watercolor pencils and watercolor paper today.

More circles in my sketch book.

Today’s effort was a random (and ineffective) experiment with watercolor (I so don’t know how to work with watercolor paint). I didn’t have time to really get into something and wasn’t coming up with ideas. This is the kind of creation that may someday be reincarnated into another work, like this one, which also started as random swipes of paint and sat for a couple of years until I saw something in it. Today’s work is the kind of art that my friend Gerry looks askance at (a five year old could do this, there’s no real skill or technique involved, and I don’t necessarily disagree with him). This effort fits with Illustration Friday’s topic Pretend. Pretend this painting is about something. Consider it a kind of Rorschach test; what do you see in it? I saw sunlight on the water of a lake.