I art because I am

To me good art is something that is alive. Something that stirs one's soul or captures a particular moment. Something that looks like it should be breathing regardless of whether it is a still life or a statue or even a splattering of color. Obviously the life doesn't come from the subject, it comes from the perception of the artist.

I think I see myself as an artist the same way 5 year old might. It's not a mater of being good or bad as much as the fact that I create "art" and therefore I am an "artist". Art is a way of expressing myself, coping, having fun, and capturing things that capture my imagination. I know that has nothing to do with books, but since I enjoy both I've decided to share both.

I thought at first that colored pastel paper would be a difficult medium to work with simply because normally I draw on white papers using a pencil to draw in shadows and line.  With colored pastel paper some of the shadow is already in there and my job is to bring out the highlights and deeper shadows.  To my surprise I like it very much!  And I thought that for a first attempt at drawing something on my own it was pretty good.  (I once copied the work of a master in a drawing class, but that was only once and at least 4 years ago.)

I choose black and white pictures thinking that they would be easier to draw.

Art draw from pictures looks flat because, duh, you're drawing a 2D object.  To lessen this effect I try to imagine the actual image of what I'm drawing, and since I'm so familiar with one baby's face in particular, it's easier for me to picture the sparkle of wide-eyed innocence and the curve of soft, adorable cheeks of other babies in my mind.  It's still not quite the same, but better than just copying the image.

You may also notice that I drew everything twice, once on scraps of regular printer paper (courtesy of our local library) and then on pastel paper for the actual drawing.  I did this to avoid roughening up the pastel paper through repeated erasing and pencil indentation by becoming familiar with the picture and any trouble spots I might encounter.  I also drew a grid on top of the original paper and each drawing to increase my accuracy (i.e. erase less, it all comes back to being a little lazy and saving the paper :)

Here are my later attempts:

My favorite!

And, speaking of little ones . . .  I think someone just woke from a nap!

The Pregnancy Series: Prepregnancy

Books on pregnancy and babies are almost like books on food. You could read into infinity. Although at first I felt overwhelmed, now that I'm contemplating baby number 3 in the not too near future I love the options. It's like ice cream. Most of the time you might be fudge type of person but then one day you want a root beer float so you get vanilla and perhaps on another occasion you go with sorbet just for kicks. Each pregnancy has been different and that has come across not only in the baby and the birth but also in my reading.


How do we make a baby?
As anyone trying to have kids can testify, it's difficult to want something so badly and be able to do so little about it. While preparing for attempting child number one, I read  Get Ready to Get Pregnant by Michael C. Lu.  I can't completely recommend it since it came across a bit dogmatic. I also can't testify to the effectiveness of any books regarding fertility since that doesn't seem to be a problem for us. (Don't worry, we have plenty of other problems.) But what I loved about the book was how it gave some of the control back to me. I felt like I could do something about the outcome of trying to get pregnant and the physical well-being of our children. While I found the try and then wait game stressful, at least I felt like I was doing something to help things move along.

Wait, can we order that baby in blue?
For baby number two I really wanted a boy. Coming from a household of girls I desperately didn't want all girls.  Too much estrogen in one house can get . . .  exciting. We were only planning on having three kids so if the second wasn't a boy I already knew I would be stressing about the third child. One day I was talking to my aunt who said, "You know there are lots of things you can do to increase the odds of having a boy" "Really????"

I admit I was skeptical at first, but I checked How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby by Landrum B. Shettles out from the library and read it anyway. Apparently sperm for males swim faster and sperm females live longer and tolerate an acidic environment better. So according to Shettles, if you figure out when your ovulation occurs, time the intercourse right, and adjust a few other things you can increase the odds of having a boy or a girl. It made sense to me so I spent two months tracking my basal temperature and we gave it a shot. Nine months later VOILA! out popped Branden. He was even born the month that I wanted. I've also heard really good things about Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler and plan to read that before my next baby.

Special diet special baby?
At present I'm trying to figure out how to improve our diet as a family, and I bumped into  Deep Nutrition by Catherine and Luke Shanahan. I didn't find the entire book worth reading, but she did have some very interesting ideas. The first was her explanation of how diet drastically affects how our genes are expressed over multiple generations. This makes sense to me considering the wide range of health issues and allergies that seems to be growing rapidly in children. The other idea that resonated with me was the idea that while we are unaware of how malnourished we are it shows up in our children. For the first child a mother's body can takes nutrients from her for the baby but for later pregnancies, especially those close together, the body cannot provide the same level of nutrition and the baby is often just slightly less "beautiful" and thus healthy. Our first child is quite attractive and while our second is a darling he's just isn't as show stopping as his sister. They were born about two years apart (vs. the 3 to 4 years the book recommends.) Obviously there are a lot of other factors involved, but we're going to give the whole "make a baby with better epigenetic expression" a shot starting with our diet now. I still have a bit more exploration to do, but more on my foray into the world of "good diet" is coming up.