Tyra-and-Steve

Today would have been my dear friends Tyra and Steve's 17th anniversary; I was their Maid of Honor at their wedding, which seems like both yesterday and ages ago.

I have two favorite pictures of Tyra and Steve together. My first favorite is this one, from their wedding day, a few hours after the ceremony.

My second favorite is this one, from sometime in the 1990s. I snapped this pic at their home in Carrollton, where they lived as a young married couple and then as a family with newborn Cooper. I don't know the exact date of this pic, or if they even knew I was in the room while they cuddled by their fireplace. I just know that I love this photo and the memories of weekend visits with them that it evokes.

i carry your heart with me
(i carry it in my heart)
i am never without it
(anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear no fate
(for you are my fate, my sweet)
i want no world
(for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

e e cummings

I wish so much that we were all celebrating 17 years of marriage with them today. Instead, I will celebrate the memories of being with Tyra-and-Steve, the couple, and the privilege of having witnessed so many fun and wonderful moments, like the one captured in this photo, during their 15 years together.

The Year of Living Creatively: Week 2

So Mondays are hard . . . for just about anything. This is true when you're trying to be creative. Day 7, March 14 2011: I introduced my kids to the joys of scrapbook stickers. Don't laugh. This was truly a creative and spontaneous thing. I wanted to do something with my 10 year stash of stickers (yes, I started collecting acid-free stickers in 2001) and pulled out two binders full of them so I could *do something* with them. My younger child became very interested in what I was doing; she'd never seen my full collection, neither had my older daughter. We went through the whole collection, mostly Carys and I, and thought off all kinds of projects we could do with them! Carys seems to love them as much as I do.

I have adored stickers since I was a child. I have albums full of them from the 80s (sadly, not acid-free, but full of memories of cool designs and allowance money spent.) I also decided, sort of spontaneously as well, to bequeath half (or more) of my collection to my girls, so they too can start their own collections and projects. We divvied them up and they took theirs away in acid-free plastic boxes, new treasures for them to dive into if they need inspiration for their next craft project. And I was okay with that.

Day 8, March 15, 2011: Oh we were so creative today! Funny how an expiring Groupon can spur you to such creative heights. I bought a Groupon to a local paint-your-own pottery place months ago, and we had to use it. We had decided beforehand that the girls should paint something for my Dad's upcoming birthday, and they did. But while browsing the selection of ready-to-paint pieces, I discovered the perfect metal frame with hooks to hang in my house. In fact, I'd been thinking for the past week or so that we need some hooks on the wall to get stuff off the floor. Stuff like backpacks, etc. The metal frame holds 4 large tiles, to be painted by me (with some help from the girls). So 2 1/2 hours later, the girls had painted tiles decorated with their handprints and I had designed a monogram tile for each of them. I even free-handed the designs! A huge leap for me. I usually don't trust myself to do something like that because I might mess it up and still have to pay for it! I can't wait until the pieces are fired and assembled.

Days 9-10, March 16-17, 2011: Okay, it's also hard to be purposely creative when you're traveling. We did quick road trip up to Austin, packed with visiting friends and relatives, eating our favorite Austin food and shopping. Too busy to be creative, seriously. Then when we arrived home, we had out-of-town guests join us about an hour later! So I'm amending my 'year of living creatively' rule to excuse traveling days (and days when we have company) when necessary. (Although I did attempt to be creative when we were in Houston last week.)

Day 11, March 18, 2011: This was the day our lovely visitors departed for home in the midwest. I had big plans to try some new cake techniques today, but really just spent the day watching shows I'd recorded on the DVR, playing on the computer and napping! So, no excuses at all for the lack of creativity. But everyone needs a "catch-up" day, where doing nothing at all is the order of the day. Am I right?

Day 12, March 19, 2011: I put on my Super-Creative Mom Cape and walked my younger child through the steps of creating her own board game for a school project. Choices of projects were: report, poster, PowerPoint presentation or "other creative idea." Obviously we chose "other." I casually suggested that she create a board game about her assigned research topic: Kangaroo Rat. I love creating board games. The first time I made one was in 5th grade for a Civil War project and my teacher absolutely loved it, asked if she could keep it, and had it laminated for future classes to play with. Laminated. Immortalized forever at the tender age of 11. Carys loved the game idea too so we ran with it.

We made a list of what supplies might be required (the list she created was pretty amusing, by the way, and highlights the unique logic of a 1st grader). Then we went to Target and walked up and down aisles looking for things that could be used as other things. *Super Creative Juices at Work Here.* For example, small drawer knobs became game board pieces, with some tweaking of course. Electrical tape to make decorative hinges for the board. Super-proud that everything we bought was my idea, but then again, I was shopping with a 1st grader. Carys designed the board game path ("No shorcuts like in Candyland, Mommy.") and I cut out the squares for the game spaces. We didn't finish the game; attention spans were waning. But it was an awesome start and I loved the feeling of creating something totally new out of lots of other things.

Day 13, March 20, 2011: This was Day 2 of the Kangaroo Rat Game project. I was really getting into it. I went online, as my daughter is not allowed to Google yet, and found cool pics of super-adorable kangaroo rats from various educational websites. We had all these ideas about how the game should be played and therefore what needed to be created for it (too many ideas really). This kept us busy for a while, as did some non-creative but very necessary research about the kangaroo rat. Super-Creative Mom's work is never done!

Photo from Google Images

The Year of Living Creatively: Week 1

I kicked off my Year of Living Creatively on my birthday, and have attempted to be "creative" each day. The first day was actually the hardest, as it was jam-packed with mostly non-creative things to do. But I tried. It was sometimes fun, sometimes surprising. As I go along, I am sort of defining what counts as creative, at least to me.

Image from Amazon.com

Day 1, March 8, 2011: I read a story aloud to my Daisy Girl Scout troop about the founding of Girl Scouts on March 12. 1912, in celebration of Girl Scout Birthday Week. I had to think of an activity for them to do that would be meaningful and fun at the same time, so at the very last minute (as in 30 seconds before I introduced the activity), I asked them to create a birthday cake on paper for Girl Scouts (99 years old this year!) that incorporated different elements of the story I had just told them. I almost always plan something for the girls to do ahead of time, so I really went out on a limb during the meeting when I spontaneously made up an activity for them to do that would also help them earn their Girl Scout Birthday patch! The girls were a little confused by my instructions at first, but they took off with it and I was so pleased and surprised by the results. They managed to incorporate different things from the story, each girl remembering something that made an impression on her. Some of the "decorations" on their cakes included: 1912, the year of the 1st Girl Scout meeting; 18, the number of girls who attended; Savannah, Georgia, where the meeting took place; basketball, an activity the first girl scout troop enjoyed; blue, the color of the first Girl Scouts' uniforms. Overall, the girls showed more creativity than I, but I did have to come up with the idea of the Girl Scout birthday cake in a matter of minutes, so I was quite proud of myself anyway.

Day 2, March 9, 2011: This was a good baking day for me. I finally perfected the new vanilla cake recipe that I've been tweaking since September! I have been baking it for customers since October, and it tasted fine, but I was less satisfied with the cake's texture. The recipe was originally a mash-up of at least 3 recipes that I liked. I had an 'a-ha' moment on Wednesday evening, used a new ingredient and tweaked the recipe some more, and it turned out exactly like I had envisioned it in my head. And it tasted divine! Prior to last fall, I had been baking the same old vanilla cake since 1999. It was ok, but I finally felt like it was time for Vanilla Cake 2.0.

Day 3, March 10, 2011: This was my 2nd day to be creative in my work. For the first time ever, I decorated a cake for a customer entirely with rolled fondant only. I have always had a love-hate relationship with that sugary medium. Since I began decorating cakes in 1998, I have always shied away from 100% fondant cakes. I love buttercream too much, for one thing, and fondant has always seemed too much like messing around with Play-doh. I prefer the challenge of turning out detailed decorations on a cake with buttercream and a variety of decorating tips, but on Thursday decided that my creative challenge would be to do an all-fondant decorated cake. Obviously I have used fondant, fairly regularly lately, but mostly for small decorations on top of the cake or accent pieces. This time I went all in. I even threw in rice krispy treats as part of the cake's construction. It was a 3D Minion (from the movie Despicable Me) for a sweet 1 year old girl's birthday. I loved how it turned out and felt very creative at the end of the day.

Day 4, March 11, 2011: I went out for sushi for the first time since I moved to this city eight years ago. Is that creative enough? I do like sushi when it's mostly cooked ingredients (ie. Korean style) but feel a teensy bit squeamish when it's raw fish. I probably wouldn't have thought of Happy Hour at a sushi restaurant, but thanks to my adventurous friends, I went anyway and enjoyed it! My previous eating-out sushi experiences have been in Austin, Dallas and Vancouver, so it was nice to find a sushi place here that everyone seems to like.

Day 5, March 12, 2011: I went out of town and discovered that I had forgotten to pack several things. Necessity is not only the mother of invention but of creativity as well! I figured out how to make a paltry couple of pieces of jewelry fit several outfits, and how to apply my makeup without my key makeup brushes. That's creative, isn't it?!

Day 6, March 13, 2011: I became a child again at the Children's Museum of Houston and created some Pop Art with my 6 year old. I was simply going to watch her be the artist, but the tables loaded with markers and blank pages were too irresistible for me. I honestly could not remember the last time I sat down to color and draw just for fun, so I needed to retreat back to the childhood self who loved to do just that.

Today starts another week of being creative every day. I'm looking forward to what I can do and try over the next 7 days!

40 = Creative Every Day

Hmm . . . It's an hour past midnight on March 8, 2011, and I am now officially 40 years old. I've approached this date for the past several months, weeks, days by alternating between feeling horrified (God, I'm so old!) and pretty blase about the whole thing (eh, whatever). Either way, for a few weeks now I've felt like I needed to shake things up a bit, step out of my very cozy comfort zone, and do something. Something else. Something different. Something scary. Something fun. I just wasn't sure what the something would be yet.

Just a few days ago, I stumbled on a blog called The B-Roll. It officially kicked off on March 8, 2010 and chronicles one man's journey from birthday to birthday with one goal in mind: "Do something creative at least once a day and document it." I was tickled that he and I share a birthday (alas, I am older than he) and that he has spent the last 365 days doing something creative or even trying something new each day. Perhaps it wasn't an accident that I discovered Charlie's blog.

This challenge led me to Creative Every Day. For almost 3 years, blogger Leah has hosted the Creative Every Day Challenge, complete with optional monthly themes for inspiration. Participants sign up and post the results of their creative endeavors. Exactly the kind of semi-organized nudging I need.

So I am stealing a page from both of these amazingly creative people, and in honor of turning 40 years old, I am launching my own 365 Days of Creativity! And I'm telling everyone right now--I will not be blogging daily about it. (You know me, that would admitting defeat before the whole thing even begins!) I will commit to updating weekly what I have been doing creatively every day!

Obviously, creativity can be defined in so many ways. That's what makes this challenge so difficult and easy at the same time. I have no idea, at 1 1/2 hours into my 41st year, what forms my own creativity will take or where this challenge will lead me. I don't care; the journey will be interesting enough!

"Be an everyday creative, be creative every day."
~ Creative Every Day blog

Will You Be My Valentine?

Well, from one holiday greeting to the next! That's how we roll here at my blog! Sheer laziness coupled with extreme busyness has prevented me from posting since last month. But here I am again, with homemade Valentine wishes for everyone:



My digital Valentine is becoming an annual tradition for me! I truly wish I had time to create a special one-of-a-kind valentine for each and every one of my nearest and dearest. But until I do, please accept this one with much love and friendship from me.

Happy Valentine's Day!

LAYOUT CREDITS:
Card design scraplifted from Two Peas in a Bucket, artist unknown; Papers: Rhonna Farrer for Two Peas in a Bucket 'Basic Black & White' Gift Wrap Kit; Robyn Gough for Digital Scrapbook Place 'Pieces of Mmm' Free Kit; Embellishments: Rhonna Farrer for Two Peas in a Bucket '2 Organic' Kit, Betsy Tuma for Two Peas in a Bucket 'Glitterati' Free Kit; Peanuts cartoon strip by Me; Font: Traveling Typewriter by Carl Krull

930 Things to Be Happy About

Happy New Year! January weather is very often too 'wintry' for me-- dark, dreary, wet, cold. Without the anticipation of any holidays to perk things up a bit, January for me is a slow month of let-downs. It's far too easy to start obsessing about little things and get down in the dumps when you have dreary weather outside to match. How easily one loses perspective.

Last week I was feeling sorry for myself for several reasons. Resentful, even. It took me until today to give myself a little shake and to remind myself that my problems are too upper-middle class to be taken seriously. That is, they are not real problems.

I was rummaging around in a storage closet tonight and discovered something that I hadn't thought about it years; I had no idea I still owned it. It was my huge 930 Things to Be Happy About poster that I bought in Fall of 1993, during my first semester of graduate school at the University of Washington. I knew the moment I saw it at a gift shop on The Ave that I had to have it. I taped it to my closet door in the bedroom of the apartment I shared with five other grad students and would often look at it when I was sick of studying. It always made me smile. I think it wasn't entirely an accident that I found it again tonight.

It's almost impossible to feel sad and sorry for yourself if you read through just 1/100th of the entire list of 930 Things. I remembered this instantly after unrolling the poster. (Why 930 Things? Because that's all that would fit on the poster! The poster, of course, was based on the very popular 1990 book 14,000 Things to Be Happy About by Barbara Kipfer.)

I put the enormous poster in my office, where I have absolutely no wall space left due to books, frames and shelves, but am determined to find a spot for it so that I can once again glance at it whenever I need a little pick-me-up. Seventeen years later, those Happy Things will once again be my constant reminders that life, especially mine, is pretty good.