I had grand plans for this summer. One road trip to spend time with friends in the Pacific Northwest, and then "vacation at home" for the rest of the summer, exploring and enjoying the endless number of places here in the Bay Area that we never seem to have time for: Exploratorium, Monterey Aquarium, Giants baseball, Santa Cruz, the Tech, Lawrence Hall of Science, hiking and biking all of our beautiful county parks. It was going to be the best summer ever. Until next year.
But I am sidelined by a knee injury, for which the best treatment is time off. I am supposed to keep weight off my knee so that it can properly heal itself. Great. Well, staying completely off one's leg for any amount of time is, as we all know, a practical impossibility for anyone with kids. Then there are MY kids, one of whom was very likely the culprit behind said injury. "Nuff said.
So, I had to re-write the summer plans. I am going to enlist help so we can at least do some of the things I had planned, with help, but we are going to spend a fair number of days hanging at home, so I needed to come up with a game plan that did not include watching movies and playing video games. Well, last month I went to a scrapbooking retreat, which is open to all hobbies and crafts, and I was fortunate enough to sit across from a lovely woman named September, who was an artist. She creates these beautiful mixed media collages, and I thought "I want to do that!" So, off to Michael's I hobbled, and bought some art canvasses, some artists paints, dug out a bunch of my scrabooking papers and embellishments and sat down with the boys to engage in some art! The boys do seem to enjoy it, but they don't want to spend nearly the same amount of time creating their art as I do. I am really having fun with this, and I have made five collages! Poor kids may never get to leave the house now, because I'm loving this! Anyway, here are four of my first five. What do you think?
