Mar 14, 2017

Today was a snow day and Bryan even had a late start with work, so he took the kids out to play in the snow this morning, which was great because they got to get out and play and I got to stay inside and get some work done on the computer.

I’ve been meaning to keep going on my Illustrator class for weeks now, but knowing that it doesn’t expire is kind of terrible in the motivation department. Also I got super consumed with trying out sewing quiet pages and figuring out which ones to include in the patterns/kits. But now that I pretty much have that all figured out, working on the illustrations and instructions was kind of the next step. But also I was super overwhelmed by it because my skills in Illustrator are (or at least feel) close to nil. But anyway, I decided to take advantage of some rare alone time during daylight hours and get started on the pattern illustrations.

I was going to get going on more of the class, but soon realized it was boring, and then remembered that I’ve already taken the class once before and that I do what I want. So I gave myself permission to never “finish” the class unless I feel like it and just treat it as a guide when I need it and move on with the stuff I actually wanted to do. Sometimes being your own boss is the best.

So I went straight to designing pattern pieces and figured I’d just see how far I got. As it turned out, I was able to design all of the pattern pieces for all of the pages. Boo-yah. I also started working on a layout and little illustrations for the instructions. I’m not gonna lie, it looks so legit and I’m so proud of it. Maybe in five years or six months or two days I’ll look back at it and be like, “oh man I can do so much better than that now,” but it looks like a real legit pattern and I’m feeling pretty awesome about it.

The only downside to all this is that I was a really lame mom today. Once I get going on something (especially something I’ve been dreading for weeks and thought I was going to be terrible at), I don’t really like to stop and lose the momentum. Or the computer, since Felix likes to watch Daniel Tiger on it. Sooo I may have spent pretty much all day on the computer working on this stuff while the kids played. It was mostly ok, but I feel a little bad about Olivia getting really bored while Felix was taking a nap and that I didn’t play games with her when she asked me to.

The good news/bad news is that they’ve already declared tomorrow to be another snow day, so I guess I have a chance to redeem myself with my children. I’m already trying to mentally gear up for doing something fun like pulling out the paints and painting with them or something. Or maybe if the mom guilt sets in real bad I’ll even pull out the playdough. But probably I won’t because I’m not that hard on myself and I really hate playdough.

Anyway, just another day in the life of a not-perfect mom who’s really proud of her personal accomplishments. Whoop.