slightly wonky

Yes, I am still here…although my focus on art has taken a serious hiatus.  I recently stopped sending my son to the preschool that he has been attending, for reasons that I will not bore you with.  In a nutshell: I have no regular childcare now.  SAVE ME.  My mom has been exceedingly helpful by coming to watch my son while I attempt to run errands, like picking up six of my drawings from the framer, or having a series of stressful portfolio reviews.  I am CLEARLY not cut out to be a 24 hr.-a-day-stay-at-home-mom.   You know those blogs where all of the photos are dreamy and misty, and where the author is a stay-at-home-mom who makes muffins from scratch with wild blueberries that she just picked whilst her brood of delightful children invent delightful games with rocks and sticks?

This is not one of those blogs.

I feel that having a child is one of the universe’s ways of telling us that we have stuff we need to work on…and it’s only by being confronted with such issues as a parent, that we will ever attempt to work on those things we need to.  Am I being too vague?  Okay.  Basically, I have a very short fuse and an excess of buttons that are easily pressed.  My son, whom I love dearly, has been, besides “my little love”, the one impetus for me to excruciatingly stretch my fuse and reduce the tsunami normally unleashed when my buttons are pushed.

Sigh.  I love him, AND he can seriously drive me cuckoo for Cocoapuffs.

Yes, my eyeballs explode just like that.

My mother and I recently took him to the MFA to see the samurai exhibit. Great idea, right?  Aren’t I “Mom of The Year”?  Hmm.  The universe told me “no,” as I hopelessly overestimated my own brilliance and the attention span of my five-year-old…

Seriously.  What is not to love, right?  The helmets especially were…AMAZING.  It’s hard to believe that anyone wore these, as they are so fantastic, intricate, and other-worldly.  I especially liked the room where several were set up to be “on horseback.”  In spite of the similarities between his Lego “Ninjago” figures and these REAL suits of armor, my son gave up halfway through the exhibit and wanted to leave.

SERIOUSLY.  Is there ANY comparison?  Sheesh.  Maybe if they could have had someone walking around in a samurai outfit…kind of like a “Late Edo period Chuck E. Cheese”, the show would have been a bigger hit with my son?

No?  I’m not sure what would have scared him more…a masked samurai walking around or that big rodent?  The kid in this photo doesn’t look too sure either…

Besides being a well intentioned yet hopelessly idealistic parent these past few weeks, I also attended the reception of one of the group shows that I am in.  It was the “New Talent / New England” juried show at the St. Botolph Club in Boston.  Nice!

Thank you to Kyla P., Karen S., Karina C., Marcus S., and Charlie S. for coming to see it!  I really appreciate it.  I also appreciated being able to go out and have a good laugh with friends, as that doesn’t happen often enough, IMHO.  My friend, Kyla, brought me something that evening that she had been meaning to give me for weeks:

Really?

I don’t remember anyone saying ANYTHING in my professional development class about bringing stuffed animals to show openings…do I really need to be holding a deranged stuffed Peep while I am trying to carry on an intelligent conversation and look remotely professional?

Of course I did.  Kyla, thank you for coming to the reception AND for reminding me why we are friends in the first place.

Now, if I can just hold onto this thing for a few days before my son absorbs it into his growing harem of freakish toys…

Is that selfish of me?  I’ll just go look up this kind of “typical parenting dilemma” in my growing pile of parenting books…