Just another day

I'm at an age where I'm supposed to hate birthdays or at the least, downplay them for fear of "getting old".  No way man!  I LOVE my birthday.  It's my own personal holiday.  I can be a diva.  I get new stuff.  People bring me cake.  I typically take the day off from work. What's not to love?
So here I am, at the ripe old age of 37, 6 months pregnant and wearing my awesome handmade birthday crown:

Yep, my fabulous husband and fabulous daughter made me a fantastic crown to wear for my birthday.  I wore it to work.  I'm wearing it at home.  T also suggested to TJ that my birthday present should be getting my nails done.  I don't know how/where she came up with that, but we were surprised at what a good idea it was.  So I'm now sporting glittery fingernails and bright almost- BMW M3 blue toes.

Birthdays are often about a new gadget for me: iPhone, iPod, camera, whatnot.  In fact Birthday iPod 2006 has been pressed into (underutilized) service as T's sleepytime "rain sounds" machine.  This year we got a new computer for our living room so that T can watch the occasional DVD there.  Plus we can use it as a digital photo frame/slideshow thingy when we're not watching anything and also stream our music through it.  It's supposed to show up today - woo hoo!
Birthday Week also has included a trip to Canlis, most years since 2005.  This year is no different. Hooray!  Today is a Good Day.

What about you - do you celebrate your birthday or try to ignore it?

Project Life: Ireland Edition

I've been trying to get to the mythical land of "caught up" on Project Life since we returned from Ireland.  I knew I'd get behind on vacation, but didn't anticipate the total lack of interest in the month before we left.

So each week since we returned, I've been doing one "old" week and the current week, so that I can eventually close the gap and just work on one week at a time.  This was hard to do with the vacation photos, because there were SO MANY to go through and then I had to narrow down which ones to use for the album.  I'll probably make a separate photo book with all of our trip pictures (add another thing to the list...).

But finally, last week, I finished the Ireland trip.  Woot!  I made the executive decision to use more than one 2 page spread for each week because even though I was sick, we ended up doing quite a bit of stuff.  So really, it was more work than I anticipated.

I started getting a little more adventurously crafty with the 2x3" spots when I didn't have photos, and for the last week I downloaded some designs for my cool Silhouette die cutting machine to fill in some of the slots.  That was pretty fun and there are a ton of Project Life compatible designs out there.

Click each photo to see a larger version.

In our first week, we settled nicely into our rental house in Kenmare, and wandered around the town.  We took an afternoon trip to Killarney.  Later that week, TJ and T went on a couple of excursions while I stayed home to sleep (thanks, virus).  TJ had his first Guinness on tap in Kenmare, and continued his comparison study whenever we found ourselves at a pub for a meal.

Week 1: airport, Kenmare, Killarney

Week 1: Killarney, Staigue Fort, daddy-daughter excursions

Week 1: more daddy-daughter fun, soy milk at Eask Tower

In our second week, I returned to the doctor, which didn't help much either.  I was able to make it to the playground in Kenmare (which TJ and T visited a lot) and an ancient stone circle, which T liked as much as the playground.  TJ also found The Vestry, an old church converted into a house, which he was all set to purchase until he realized the yard had a cemetary (creepy!).  We took a road trip out to Ballinskellig, an old priory built right by the water and had the worst meal of our trip on the way back.  Nice restaurant, horrible (and expensive!) food.  I wanted to visit a city so we went to Cork and wandered about aimlessly.  Next time we'll have a plan.  That weekend, T got to feed a baby lamb with a bottle at the Kissane Sheep Farm close to Kenmare.

I wish someone would invent some kind of tiny (cheap!) flexible screen with a memory chip so you could embed a little video in your scrapbooking pages.  I'm sure this is something that'll come out in the next 10 years, and of course if I did these pages digitally, I could do it now.  But I'm a tactile, pen and paper sort of girl...  Akso, the cute little hexagon card on the last page is from Smitha Katti's free printables on her blog - woot!

Week 2: Ballinskellig, awful meal at Dooleys, Kenmare stone circle and playground

Week 2: Cork, Kissane Sheep Farm

Week 3 was all about us wanting to go home (ie our Vacation Limit had been reached).  I was tired of being sick and not being in my own comfy house and bed.  But the high point was our all-too-short trip to Dublin.  We were there for about a day and a half and resolved to come back when the kids are older because there was so much to see and do and we barely scratched the surface.  I think it was one of my favorite parts of the trip, because I'm a city girl at heart. 

T loved the crowded but super fun playground in St Stephen's Green, TJ and I liked the Guiness Storehouse tour even though it was super-touristy, and we all enjoyed wandering around St. Patrick's Cathedral.  The Hop-on, Hop-off bus tour was an inspired suggestion of TJ's so that we could get a quick tour of the city and not have to deal much with traffic.

Week 3: Dublin - Guinness Storehouse, St Stephen's Green, St Patrick's Cathedral

Week 3: Dublin, funky diner in Farranfore and Heathrow Airport

I did a decent job of keeping ticket stubs and business cards to use for the scrapbook.  One of my favorite slots in Week 3 was the star cutouts from the Silhouette machine, which I backed with crinkled up shiny silver tissue paper.   I'm getting more adventurous about using papers from my stash and making *some* attempt to coordinate colors, or at least color families.  I'm sure I'll get better at it over time.  I'm also becoming ruthless at photo editing and throwing out duplicate photos or those that just aren't that good or interesting.

I  ordered some automatic Instagram prints from my Android phone with Piccaprint, and their quality is great, but they are just too expensive when you figure in shipping from Sweden.  And now that I have a fancy new printer, I can just print them at home.  In fact, most of the week 3 photos were printed at home, and the quality is as good as the ones I got from Target.  Hooray for that.

Now that the vacation pages are done, I can go back to my usual (easier!) 2 pages per week and hopefully crank through the rest of April and the beginning of May in short order.  That's the plan for the next few weeks...

I'm fully focused, man

OK, this post is a little braggity-braggy so if you're not into that, then feel free to skip it.  I even borrowed the title from 50 Cent's master work "In Da Club" which is one of my favorite "I'm so awesome" rapper songs.  I think it was the track that made TJ wonder exactly who he was married to when he borrowed my iPod one day...

Remember way back in January when I said one of my necklaces was accepted for publication in Bead Trends magazine?  I held my breath, figuring it might get cut at the last minute, and not getting my hopes up.

But, as it turns out, there it was, in the June 2012 issue with my name on it and everything :)  There was another page in the back with my website details and the materials list.  So weird and surreal to see my name in print, but I am *totally* stoked.  (Click on the image if you want to see a larger version.)

The lesson I learned from this?  Don't be afraid to put myself out there.  I've still got my eye on Cards magazine, but haven't had a ton of time to sit down and make a bunch of new cards aligned with their submission guidelines.  But I printed up the guidelines and marked the deadlines on my calendar so I'm sure gonna try.

The second little braggy bit is that my blurb about Canlis, our absolute favorite Seattle restaurant, was published on Gourmet.com!  It was an opportunity I got by being part of the BlogHer network, and I wrote it figuring it wouldn't make the cut.  But it did :)  Hooray!

This ties back to something I saw on the anonymous question list at work (man, that thing is full of blog fodder!).  Someone was worried about performance reviews and how despite getting good feedback from people they still get lower scores than they expect, and were feeling really bad about it.  Like bad enough to go to therapy and get medication.  Which I'm all for, by the way, if you're feeling crappy.

But it made me realize how important it is NOT to let your entire identity and self-worth be based on how you're doing at work, and how easy it is for us to fall into that trap when we get all the accolades, awards, and bonuses.  Then when they slow down or stop coming, you start to feel useless, or "bad at your job" and this can spiral into worse mental health issues.

Those work rewards are tangible, whereas something like being a great parent is often unappreciated.  Sure, occasionally your hubby or mom might give you an occasional compliment (which I treasure for months and revisit in my head every time I'm feeling down), but by and large, your efforts seem unnoticed and the "rewards" come much later, when your kids develop into well-adjusted adults.

This is why I like to have things outside of work that I can work at, and be good at.  By and large the activities themselves give me joy.  My perfect day is one with a HUGE chunk of uninterrupted crafty time.  Getting published, or selling my work, is an added bonus. 

This can also become unhealthy if you stop getting joy out of the process and just want the external rewards, but at least you're diversifying, to borrow a term from the personal finance arena.

But having all these different "passions" in life means I'm probably doing well in at least some of them, even if the others feel like they're not going well or the results are not yet evident (as in the case of BabyT who is doing a great job of being 2 years old, if you know what I mean).

I'm *so* much happier now that I have a lot of different things I'm equally excited about, as opposed to pre-2007 when all I had was work.  Sometimes I struggle with having enough time to commit to all of my interests, or context-switching between them.  But that's a time-management issue and one that can be easily solved.

So, what are you excited about outside of your "day job"?

Hello, what?

As I was falling asleep last night, a thought popped into my head.  I'm really looking forward to nursing another baby.

What the heck??  When did that happen?  Before I got pregnant with T, I was thinking "you want me to do what?! And that's her only food source?  Who thought that was a good idea?"  I thought I'd have to sequester myself in a dark room somewhere and never leave the house. 

One of the first questions I asked our prospective pediatrician was her thoughts on breastfeeding because I wanted to gauge whether she was going to harangue me or guilt me if I wanted to quit.  (She did not, and she has been awesome in every way.  She said she asks new moms to try to give it a month, and that was a good answer in my book.)

It took us a long time to get the hang of it.  I didn't like it at first.   I set small goals for myself - make it through the first day, three days, a week.  Then 2 weeks, a month, and before I knew it, we got to that magical time when it was actually *easier* to nurse her than sort out a bottle.  And she got so efficient, we'd be done in less than 10 minutes and I lost my leisurely Facebook/NYT reading time.  Heh.  I was all set to quit at a year, but T got sick for the first time right around then, we had two trips planned, and we were still navigating her dairy allergy, so she nursed until just short of 14 months.  I never imagined making it for that long.  When we quit, we were both ready - not a single tear was shed and she never asked about it (ok, that made ME a little sad inside, I'll admit!).

I even got brave enough to nurse in public, sort of.  I could do it in the car, or at other gatherings with mamas and babies.  I never managed to get comfortable nursing in a random public place like a restaurant but I suspect Baby X' will be nursed wherever we happen to be, since we'll be out and about more.

So maybe I'm remembering those blissful, easy days of nursing in bed for 10 minutes and going about our business.  When it's 4 hours a day, it probably won't be so awesome.  But oddly, I'm still looking forward to it.

But there is nothing in this world that will make me look forward to pumping again.  Blech.

The Artist's Way Toolkit: BlogHer Review

I was super-excited to see the request to review Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way Toolkit.  It's a book I've wanted to read for a while, so getting access to the online version for free sounded like an awesome deal.

You can use the website without having read the book - there's enough introductory material there to explain the background.  The Artist's Way is a series of exercises to lead you to more creative thinking and inspiration, and to get you past anything blocking you from being creatively awesome.  It's not just for visual artists - it's for writers, crafters and all manner of creative thinkers and doers. 

One of the core practices she asks you to adopt is doing "morning pages" - three pages of stream-of-consciousness journal writing in the morning.  She insists you must do this by hand, rather than typing, which is my style anyway.  This is something I'll keep doing for a long time - I haven't yet made it part of the daily routine, but I do it more days than not.  It's quite surprising what it yields - it clears my brain of any nagging items, lets me capture random creative ideas that I didn't know I had, as well as more concrete to-dos for the coming days.  It's been easy and fun, and a good way to start the day.

The Toolkit has other components - a daily affirmation, which is not really my thing, but had some good quotes (most of them by Cameron herself).  There was also an audio component called "Creative Soundbites" which was a little woo-woo for me - cheesy New Age music with people talking about metaphysical concepts.  I didn't get much out of that.

The part I loved was the weekly "Artist's Date".  It's an assignment to go and do an activity on your own, to stimulate creativity, and they've been fun ones - take a walk through a (safe) part of your town you've never explored, buy candy you enjoyed in your childhood and eat it, visit a funky thrift store, etc.  Fun little tasks you can then write about or capture ideas from.

The Artist's Way Exercises were another core practice, and one I couldn't get into, but still want to attempt.  They're hard questions where you have to analyze blockers to your creativity, or come up with new ideas.  They're meant to make you think and really dig deep inside yourself for good answers.  I'm feeling a little stressed and busy these days so just couldn't make the time to sit down and focus on these as much as I should.  It would be awesome work for someone who intends to make a career out of their creative pursuits, though.

What I would have liked more was a choice of activities for the Artist's Date or the Exercises - ie, if you don't like the current one, you should be able to skip to a new one.  But the online version has the same one up for a week, so you have to wait and log in to get a new one the following week.

The site is set up like a "notebook", which starts with a "contract" to commit to the practice of morning pages and doing this work.  That was a nice touch to get some commitment from the users.  You can write up your experiences from the Artist's Dates and Artist's Way Exercises in that "notebook" and save them online.  In addition, there are some more blank sections for other creative notes and you can export your work.

For things like this, I'm more a pen-and-paper kind of girl, so I didn't make use of these sections.  I'd rather have hardcopy notes in front of me.

There's a mobile app for Apple devices, but not Android or Windows Phone, sadly.  The material is supposed to be "spiritual" and thus mentions God a lot, but is not focused on a specific religion.  I'd have liked it better if it didn't mention God altogether, but I think that is a core part of the original Artist's Way and I can respect that.

I'd definitely recommend this toolkit for folks looking for some new and different ways to spark their creativity, *especially* if you're trying to support yourself as an artist or writer.  It's great for those who are surgically attached to their laptop or iPad. 

Have you read The Artist's Way?  What did you think?

I was compensated for this review by BlogHer Book Club but the opinions expressed are totally my own.