The Clareverse

It’s been a year since the last time I did any painting, but considering how disused my skillz are this turned out pretty well. The subject matter is just a bunch of overlapping simple shapes, so I focused on playing with colors.

I departed from my customary palette with a couple new pigments I found in the bargain aisle at Hobby Lobby: Winsor & Newton Cobalt Green and Thioindigo Violet. I really liked these colors. The cobalt green has a lovely cool hue and flocculated very nicely. Or it might have been granulating. The thioindigo violet behaved wonderfully when I dropped it into the green wet-into-wet. Instead of muddying the green, it retreated and formed bright edges.

I used masking fluid to make the veins of the leaves. They turned out messier and thicker than I’d have liked, but the whole painting has a casual sloppiness, so I don’t mind too much. Watercolor is the wrong medium for perfectionism, anyway. Perhaps that’s why it appeals to me; it’s the opposite of programming, in which I spend 90% of my time finding and fixing my mistakes. In watercolor painting I just have to live with my mistakes.

1.) I gave birth to a unusually calm and quiet baby.

2.) I put her in her crib at night.

If you follow these two steps, you also will enjoy having a baby who magically sleeps through the night.

Seriously, I have a particular Bedtime Process:
1. Around 6 or 7, give the baby a warm bath. She tires herself out kicking and splashing.
2. Feed and swaddle in a Kiddopotamus SwaddleMe
3. Cuddle & rock in a dark room til she falls asleep. Takes 5-15 minutes. Put her in the crib.
4. At 10:30, take her out of the crib and feed her without waking her up. She can drink from a bottle while sleeping if you get it far enough in her mouth. After a few weeks she learned how to nurse without waking up, so we nurse and then top her off with a bottle. Feed her until she’s so deeply asleep she can’t swallow any more. If she’s really relaxed she won’t have swallowed any air, so just burp her a little.

If all these steps are followed the baby sleeps until sometime between 6:30-8:30am, but I suspect it only works because she’s a freaky easy baby.

If you have a baby and you want to go out for a run, you should feed the baby really really well before you go running, because if she’s hungry when you get back, she will not at all appreciate being expected to nurse from hot sweaty boobs. There will be screaming, and rinsing off the boobs and scrubbing them with a washcloth will not be enough to stop the screaming.