Penultimate Pea

I've been playing around with mixing colored clays…

cooking nice breakfasts…

doing a little bit of painting…

And sleeping a lot (no photos of that!) Not feeling so good with words these days…

I've felt so disjointed lately…I feel like I'm working on stuff non-stop, but don't have anything finished to show for it. Too many projects going on at once. I sat down to write my master list on Saturday, with all of my projects broken down into steps and next actions, to hopefully alleviate some of this feeling—it was three pages long. Trying to keep all of it going simultaneously (while also caring for a baby and trying to take care of household stuff) has been overwhelming to say the least.

And I end up mixing projects together and hinging one piece of a project on doing something unrelated, so that neither of them gets done: I want to get holiday cards made, which means taking photos of Emmett, designing the card, and getting it printed. But as long as I'm ordering something from the printer, I think, I should really get some business cards made up, which means finishing a sculpture that I'd actually want to put on a business card and then designing those too. Logical in some way, but probably not so efficient, and utterly unrealistic to get done in the next three days.

I'm trying to figure out ways to pare things back and not get myself totally wrapped up in non-essential stuff. The project above is one of the things being cut out. We're going to "Quinn Christmas" (Ryan's extended family's big get-together a few weeks before the holiday) this year for the first time, and in my excitement I started planning little gifts we could bring for each family. Oh, I thought, I'll just make some cookies (which I do each year around the holidays anyway), and each individual or family can get a plate or box of them. But then I was browsing through a catalog and saw these cute embroidered felt ornaments and thought, hmm, I could make those, and wouldn't it be nice to tie one of those to the top of each package? Totally ignoring the fact that I haven't embroidered anything since I was six (when I used to wish for rain so that I could use the indoor recess time to do cross stitch—yeah, I was a nerd even then). I cut out my twenty-six bird shapes, I got out an old embroidery book I happen to have but had never looked at, I googled various stitches, I sketched out possible designs and tried various knots…I got frustrated because I had no idea what I was doing and it wasn't coming out the way I wanted it to.

And then I looked over at Ryan, peacefully reading on the couch next to a sleeping Emmett, and got really pissed. Who was he to be relaxing when I was sitting there feverishly working on intricate handmade present-toppers for his family?! And it took me a few minutes of fuming before I realized that no one was making me work on this stuff. The crafting and creativity, it's like a disease sometimes. It's okay if I don't make handmade presents for his family. Hell, it's probably okay if I don't even do any baking—this year at least, everyone will just be delighted to see the baby. Sometimes I get so caught up in this Martha Stewart madness, wanting everything to be just so, thinking I need to create this beautiful, perfect world. And, time and time again, I realize that it just ain't so. In fact, I think it often kind of annoys other people (who, in their infinite sanity, do not feel compelled to do things such as making homemade marshmallows or hand-stamping wrapping paper). I love crafting, cooking, creating stuff, surprising other people with little goodies and homemade gifts. But I need to step back sometimes and remember that if I'm not actually enjoying it, I've really missed the point.