I am up late painting and taking a break because my foot fell asleep. I am painting a 36x36 canvas and because I am at home I have no easel, so it is up against the back of my couch and I am sitting on the floor in front of it. With acrylics and painting this large I have to paint fast and concentrate a lot. I forget to move, blink, breathe. I am coming down with some stupid cold which I think my daughter has too. My throat is hurting and I have a swollen gland behind my ear. I would love to go to bed and sleep until whatever time I wake up. I don't even remember the last time I did that. I have 5 more large scale paintings to do by next Friday. And I would love to do three smaller ones in another series. I imagine that is wishful thinking, but ya never know. As long as I finish a large painting a day I am good. I have a mother's group that scheduled a private toddler class with 9 kids tomorrow. Luckily yesterday I taught offsite at a private mother's day out preschool for 6 classes and feel pretty confident for a large class tomorrow. It is a surprise to me how much I really enjoy the toddler classes. I look forward to them so much and love the creativity of 2-4 year olds. They don't worry about if it is good or bad, right or wrong, they just are having fun and the work they do is amazing. They truly live in the moment. I have a lot to learn from them.

I got my postcards from the printer for my show yesterday and I spent about 2 hours this afternoon putting them all around town. I am hoping to get another hour in tomorrow of passing them out, but we will see.They turned out really great. Even if they did accidentally make 500 instead of the 250 I ordered. Which would be great if it wasn't a one day event. Let's just say I can paper the neighborhood with these babies! Or wallpaper my bedroom with a big st. bernard head! anyway, I am beat and I feel pretty bad and I have two big brown dog ears to paint before I can get to bed, so I better go. Today was a chocolate lab, tomorrow is a giant corgi. heh. makes me laugh just thinking about it. later taters.

I am busy, busy, busy with my toddler classes, design work and painting up a storm for my big dog show. I get my postcards from the printer tomorrow and get to leave them all over town. Yippee!



And I will post shortly to let you all know how life has been. The past few weeks have been no fun at all. Some really hard life things have been going on, and this isn't the place to go into any of it, but I want to share with you how hard it can be to be supposedly living your dream and the rest of your life feels like it is swirling down a drain. When you work for your self you lose the luxury of taking some sick leave and hiding from the world. Your world might feel like it's crumbling, but you still have to put on a happy face and keep on top of your business so that when things stop swirling you still have a business to have. And those bills don't put themselves on hold because you didn't feel like taking a freelance assignment, or have not been promoting your paintings or art classes. Talk about juggling emotions. Not to mention putting on a brave face for your kids and being a strong mommy when all you really want to do is crawl under the covers and wish that maybe after a nice long nap everything would be happy and shiny again. You moms know what I'm talking about... But shiny, happy days are coming. I feel it.