drowning in alphabet soup

I have little boys.  Not girls – and I don’t know what they are like. But I can tell you boys play hard and they play dirty and they like trucks.  When presented with a room filled with dolls and kitchen sets, and books and ponies and Barbies and all manner of really great  gender neutral toys,  Chicken Little who is 2 will gravitate to the trucks, the trains and the airplanes.  He likes to drive his trucks on his hands and knees in the dirt.  The mud.  The snow.  Just keeping up with laundry is a challenge – especially when you also have to make sure you run a load of diapers ever other day for the Peanut.  

Between keeping up with a two year old, keeping the dog hair to a dull roar,  and making sure everyone is fed, and clothed, and generally clean enough to keep social services from the door it’s a full time job.  That free time I have between 2 and 6 in the morning is often taken up with nursing the baby, taking the two year old pee, and trying to catch a few moments of shut eye.   

Art is sanity for me. Creativity.  There are simply not enough hours in a day to do it.  I have so many projects I want to pursue.  Quilting and quiet books, maybe by the time I am a grandmother I will have made a quiet book.  But right now I’m lucky if I can squeeze in a spare moment to doodle in my sketch book.   I said I was going to “art journal”  and it hasn't really happened. But I did stop being afraid to sketch in my sketch book – to leave half finished ideas, to scratch out words and images in a haphazard scrawl.  

So as if I were not busy enough with life I decided to take up a correspondence course.  No – not art related .  Human Anatomy and Physiology – a medical terminology sort of affair.   – mostly because I’m crazy  .  I can think of no good other reason for it.

Now.... I've got in excess of 300 flash cards and I feel like I’m drowning in alphabet soup. I've got hundreds of abbreviations for words there aren't enough tiles in a scrabble game to spell,  my kids can’t understand a word I say ....

and really.. who calls it a sphygmometer anyway???

So when I bogged myself down last night and all I could see was letters swirling on the page. I got out the paint and thought I’d see if I could tap into some other part of my brain.  Maybe it would refresh the soul?

Here is an evening’s play.  Done with a sleeping babe in my lap, and a dog shedding at my feet, amid a sea of medical terminology flash cards....

 

Northern Lights over Lucy.  

Original Watercolour

 ©RiverWalker Arts