Loving Life

I've had an on and off relationship with art over my lifetime. Of course when you are little, you create art without a care in the world and enjoy the process of creating all the wonderful things in your mind. However, over time that careless creativity came to a grinding halt as I put judgment on my work and compared it to those around me. I grew up in a family of extremely talented artists and, being the youngest in the family, I felt like I was never as good as them, so I stopped doing art and settled for being the "musical one".  In high school, I discovered the joy of colored pencils and my art world opened back up a little. I did a few drawings here and there for people I loved and enjoyed the process of bringing joy and delight through visual art. But soon a busy life with marriage and then kids started and I had little time or energy to do any sort of art. I got my colored pencils back out when David was about two and drew this butterfly below for a friend af

We made it! We survived track season and graduation season and had a lot of fun along the way! I'm sorry I didn't post anything during that time. I was working on doing life well and I had to pare down extra things during the season so I could focus on the things that matter most to me. So, now it's time to catch back up and do a mini-recap of our busy season. One of Ana's big excitements right as track began was getting her braces off. She had them on for just a bit over a year. Here are her teeth before braces. Notice the molar growing inward below.  And one year later, she has a beautiful, straight smile!  Scarlet would occasionally set up a little welcome home display for me after a Saturday long run. Here she set this up by the door so I would see it when I came in. My glasses, my phone, a penny, some chocolate, and a love note. It made me smile.   Ana loves tiny things. Including tiny food. We found baby bananas while shopping one day. S

I have just over a week until track practice starts. I am winding down with my intense preparation period. My freezer is getting full of suppers to grab on busy nights. Cookies are piling up in the freezer as well in preparation for David's upcoming senior music recital. Lists have been made organizing the various parts of my upcoming busy season. I have this next week to finish up all my prep work and then the fun begins! I am doing all this so that I can relax and fully enjoy this busy season and not feel so overwhelmed with life. All this prep work goes against my laid back take-each-day-as-it-comes lifestyle, but I know it will help me greatly over the next two months and I'll be grateful that I took the time before to do this. Homemade granola bars sitting in the freezer to grab for meets I made a pile of breakfast burritos for a quick breakfast or snack. We are already working through them, so I made another two dozen last night to resupply. I guess they are a hi

We'll start off the day with a cute little video of Scarlet singing to you. I was prepping for a piano lesson and was getting the chords written down for this song when Scarlet starting singing along. It was so cute that I wanted a video of it. Enjoy! The snow is mostly melted now except for some leftover piles, but we finally had a very nice amount of snow the last few weeks. The girls and I enjoyed a fun afternoon of sledding one of the days. Scarlet learned to enjoy the joys of playing in it. I found a number of really cute little snow angels around the yard. I've been training for a half-marathon coming up this spring. My running adventure buddy Jamie and I had a fun run a couple of Saturdays ago. It had recently snowed and we took a small dirt road that hadn't been plowed with the fresh snow. We had to stop and make a few snow angels of our own. It's a lot harder than it looks to run through 6-8 inches of snow. My prints are the ones on the right, and