Cassie’s been home four days straight now with a temperature that bounces around between 99 to 104 degrees. Sam cut her first tooth last night, but a second one must be coming in right behind it because she keeps screaming all evening when I try to feed her.
Somebody shoot me. Please.
I have to put together a writing website now that I’ve sold a book. Here’s a sample of the artwork I’ve been putting together. This is going to be the side bar. The red roses will be the navigation buttons, with pop up text explaining what each one is for.
Cassie is home for the third day in a row with her ear infection and the flu. I can’t believe I got this kid a flu shot. She’s been sick twice since she got it. Meanwhile, Sam is teething. I swear, in the history of teething this is the longest time a child has ever taken to cut a tooth. She’s been fussing and drooling for weeks. I made the mistake of giving her Anbesol right before nursing her, and now my left nipple is numb.
And of course, I’m still struggling with the writing. I may or may not have had a break through on the “two gay guys and a horse” story last night. I at least was able to write the ending, which was good. However, I wrote it by hand in a notebook while taking a bath, so this afternoon I get to decipher my sopping wet notes. Note to self, buy a small hand-held recorder and get a bath tub tray to make this easier next time.
Cassie is currently tucked in bed for a little morning rest. I can’t stand the idea of her sitting in front of the TV all day again, even if she is sick. I pulled out the comforter we were saving for Christmas and told her it was a magic fairy blanket from Grandmama and it would help her get better if she’d get in bed and curl up with it for a while. There are actually fairies on it, by the way. Wish I had a magic fairy blanket to curl up under…
Sam, meanwhile, is nursing away. I’m wondering if she’ll be awake when she’s done or not. If she’s asleep, I’m going to sit down and write and let Michael run to the pharmacy. I hope she stays awake though. I’d rather work through her afternoon nap. She blew it off yesterday and it just about killed me.
Since both kids are quiet right now, maybe I better get to work while I can.
I gave up on inking this drawing in Corel Photopaint. I thought I could get away with doing it, but when I hit the long lines in the dress, I had to quit. The digital tablet just isn’t steady enough to handle that kind of line work, at least not in my hands. Here’s as far as I got in Corel Photopaint.
The Book Babe, Day 3
This morning I brought the sketch (originally done in Corel Photopaint) into Macromedia Flash and started inking it there. The process is a little different, but the lines come out much smoother and I can do the accents better. Here’s the results so far.
The Book Babe, Day 4
You won’t really be able to see the difference until I’ve got the inking done and I delete the digital pencil layer.
Michael and I went to bed last night around 10:30PM. Sam woke me up crying at midnight, so I did what any sensible mom would do. I turned down the monitor and went back to sleep. That may sound harsh but honestly, the kid is almost six months old and weighs about as much as a small SUV. She needs to learn to sleep through the night.
Of course, her sister woke up screaming and came running into our room about an hour after that. She complained that monsters had woken her up. I let Cassie sleep in the bed for a little while until it became obvious that she was more interested in playing than sleeping and I had Michael pack her off to her own bed.
Then Sam woke up screaming bloody murder at 2:30AM and this time I couldn’t ignore it (although somehow Michael managed to sleep through it) so I got out of bed and fetched the baby. I nursed her in bed for twenty minutes, right up until she decided to stick her fingers in my nose. Then she went back to her crib.
Around 3:30AM, I woke up to hear Cassie crying. With a HUGE sigh, I got up again and checked on my eldest child. She was sobbing about the monsters again, so I brought her back to bed with me. After about half an hour of being poked and prodded, her father announced that if Cassie couldn’t keep still, she’d have to go back to her own bed again. So Cass turned over and started poking and prodding me and I immediately told Michael to take Cassie back to bed.
My alarm goes off at five these days. Somehow I managed to crawl out of bed and get a shower, finishing up just in time to hear both children wake up screaming (again I wonder, how the hell does Michael sleep through that?). Sam is apparently teething and Cassie complained that her ear hurt. So after a long sleepless night, guess how my day went. No really. Guess.
Yep. Cassie stayed home from school and both she and Sam spent most of the day screaming. Somehow, I don’t know how, I managed to finish off the paperwork for my new publisher (I have a publisher! Joy!) and send that out, but most of the day was spent rocking one child or the other. As of right now, it’s 6:45PM and I’m desperately hoping I can get both kids in bed before 7:30 so I can have a drink and pass out. I really, really need the sleep.
Addendum: Michael went to karate class tonight. I stayed home with the kids. Sam was out by 7PM, but it took forever to settle Cassie. I gave her a bath, hoping that would calm her down, but as soon as she came out, she vomited all over the bathroom floor. She’s finally asleep now, but I may have Michael sleep on an air mattress in her room, just to keep an eye on her. I’m going to try to finish my evening chores and take a bath myself. Since Cassie still has a temperature of over 102 degrees, I will be keeping her home tomorrow as well. It may sound callous to think of work when my child doesn’t feel well, but if the kids keep getting sick, I have no idea if I’ll ever be able to work again. This is driving me crazy!
More work on this image in Corel Photopaint. I took the pencil sketch layer, changed it to blue and began digitially inking over it with Corel’s felt tip pen setting for the paint brush. So far, so good.
Well, I don’t know about you, but we had a nice Thanksgiving here Thursday. What made it particularly nice for me was the fact that I got to spend two hours writing, even though both Michael and Cassie were home all day. I have this little problem, you see, when those two are here. I just can’t get anything done. It’s been especially aggravating the last six weeks as I’ve struggled with writer’s block. I just know that having some time to actually sit down and writer would solve that problem, but it’s almost impossible to do that when the house is in a complete uproar.
What is it about having my husband and eldest child home that makes things so chaotic? It’s probably scheduling, or the lack there of. When I’m home alone with Sam, I’ve got a routine that we follow as close as we can. Nap times are at 8:30AM and 2PM. Bath time is at 7:30AM. Afternoon play time is from noon to one. Etc., etc., etc. I know what we’ll be doing and when, and I’ve built the entire schedule around Sam’s naps which, by the way, are my work hours.
Michael, however, doesn’t have this schedule memorized. Why should he? He’s not home most of the days and he doesn’t do the breastfeeding (which is also done on a schedule). Plus, he doesn’t like to get up at the butt-crack of dawn like I do, so when he’s home on the weekends, he doesn’t set his alarm to wake him up. Without a definite starting point, his day runs in a state of flux. And that’s fine for him because he knows what he has to do and he’ll eventually get it done before Monday rolls around. Unfortunately, his state of flux blows my carefully regimented schedule all to hell.
Things really came to a head on Wednesday. Due to the storm that rolled through here, Michael stayed home from work. I tried to keep Sam on a schedule, but I hadn’t even considered that Michael would be home that day, so I ran around trying to do my usual thing and kept tripping over him. That put Sam’s nap schedule way off, and my work hours too. Plus Cassie was home as well, and we were supposed to do some fun stuff that day so even though I was massively behind schedule, I took a hour or two to sit and paint with her because I promised her I would. I even read her stories and got her down for a nap, but Sam woke up about then and that was the end of my hopes for my afternoon work hours. Michael did try to rescue me. He offered to take Sam for a while so I could write. But five minutes after he left, Cassie woke up, demanding to know where her father was. When she found out he’d left, she threw a major tantrum, one that lasted right up until Michael got home. And when he walked into the house, I decided to throw a tantrum too.
“I hate it when you guys are home! I can’t get anything done! I sold a book last week, damn it, but I’ll never be able to write again because you keep screwing up my schedule! I’m tired of my work being treated like a second class priority just because it’s erotica and I work at home. If I don’t get some time to write today, I’m putting you and little Miss I-Gotta-Scream out on the lawn and I don’t care if it’s raining!”
And on and on and on. To Michael’s credit, he stood there and took it all like a man. Then he slipped out of the bedroom and took Cassie downstairs so I could work for an hour.
After my little tirade, I decided something had to be done, so I printed out a blank schedule form and sat down with Michael that night to review what would happen the next day. We wrote down nap times and meal times, added time for Michael to cook Thanksgiving dinner, and put in my work hours too. Then I posted our schedule on the fridge where we could see it and went to bed. The next morning, I got up at the butt-crack of dawn and Michael got up at 7AM, just like we’d scheduled it. And the whole day just fell into place like magic.
It was amazing how well that worked. It worked so well I was caught completely unprepared when my afternoon work hours rolled around and I had free time to do whatever I wanted. And we sat down again last night with another blank schedule and filled in that one too. So far, the day’s working out as planned. I just can’t believe it.
So there you go. I’m grateful for schedules that work and husbands who put up with temper tantrums and children who nap. I’d be grateful for the husband and kids even if they didn’t act like such angels yesterday, but you know what? It makes all the difference in the world to know they care about whether or not I get work done.
This is a rough sketch of something I’m working on right now. The cool thing about this is that it wasn’t done with pencil and paper, but done digitally in Corel Photopaint instead. I’m starting to figure out how to get Photopaint to work as a sketching program, which will go a long way towards helping me do more digital artwork.
The Book Babe
I’m trying to figure out a way to digitally ink my pencil drawings. I could do them by hand, but am wondering if I could get better results with one of my graphics programs instead. I’ve obsessed about this for three days now and the answer is ‘no.’ I’m better off doing it by hand, although I might consider investing in a light table to make this particular chore a little easier. My preferred inking style does not always lend itself to the projects I want to do, and I’d like to avoid a lot of drawing and retracing to make a clean copy of my artwork. Anyway, here are the results of digital inking from two different programs – Flash 5 and ArtRage 1.
Flash 5 inking experiment
ArtRage 1 inking experiment
Dinner with Sam…
Me: Sam, it’s dinner time! Are you hungry, precious?
Sam: Nyum nyum nyum nyum!
Me: Okay honey, don’t eat the high chair. That’s not good for you. Here, try some cereal instead. Mmmmmm, cereal.
Sam: Nyum nyum nyum nyum nyum!
Me: Oh, very good. You’re a good eater, Sam. But Mommy needs the spoon back now.
Sam: Nyum nyum nyum nyum nyum! Nyum nyum nyum!
Me: No sweetie, please don’t shove the spoon up your nose. Mommy needs that back to feed you. Give me the spoon… Sam, give me the spoon… Of fer crying out loud, Sam. Give me the spoon!
Sam: Waaaaaah! Waaaaah! Waaaaaaaaaaaah!
Me: No, don’t cry! Don’t cry! Look, here’s the airplane! Here comes the airplane! Zoooooooooooooom!
Sam: Nyum nyum nyum nyum!
Me: Very good Sam. Now let’s do a choo choo train. Choo choo, choo choo, choo choo, choo choo, WOO WOOOO!
Sam: Nyum nyum nyum nyum nyum nyum nyum nyum!
Me: Good girl! Can Mommy have her fingers back now? Uh, I need those fingers. Thank you. Okay Sam, let’s try another one. Here comes the astronaut. Here he comes in his space suit! He says, ‘Open the pod bay doors, Hal.’
Sam stares at me blankly.
Me: Okay, that’s from the movie ‘2001.’ Maybe you’ll get that when you’re older. Um, let’s do the airplane again. Here comes the airplane! Zooooooom! Zooooooooom! Zoooooo- Augh! My fingers! Sam, give me back my fingers!
Sam: Nyum! Nyum nyum nyum! Nyum nyum nyum nyum nyum nyum nyum!
Me: Aaaaaaa! Call 911! She bit off my fingers! Call 911! Aaaaaaugh!! AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!!
And that’s dinner with Sam. An hour after all this, she’ll spit everything back up, including my fingers, which is why I can still count to ten. Feeding Cassie has been an entirely different matter…
Cassie: Mommy, I don’t like chicken.
Me: Oh? Well you don’t have to eat it…
Cassie: Okay!
Me: But you’re not getting a treat if you don’t eat your dinner.
Cassie (pokes at her plate): Mommy, I don’t like broccoli.
Me: That’s fine. But you’re still not getting any treats if you don’t eat what’s on your plate.
Cassie (does a little more poking): I don’t like rice either.
Me: Once again, you will not get anything else to eat tonight if you don’t eat your dinner. Do you understand?
Cassie: Yes ma’am. Mommy?
Me: Yes, Cassandra?
Cassie: I’m done. May I be excused?
Me: Yes, you may. But you’re not getting anything else to eat tonight. Remember that.
Cassie runs off to play in the living room. During the course of dinner, she keeps running up to either me or Michael, asking for a movie, telling fart jokes, and in general acting like a little hooligan. After we’re done eating, I clear the dishes off the table. Cassie’s plate is still untouched. It’s the exact same food I tried feeding her last night, which she refused to eat then too, so I just dump it in the trash.
Me: Okay Cassie, movie time is over. It’s time to go upstairs for your bath.
Cassie: Mommy, I’m hungry. May I have something to eat?
Me: Uh, no. Remember what I told you?
Cassie looks at me blankly.
Me: You didn’t eat your dinner, so you’re not getting anything else to eat.
Cassie: But I’m hungry!
Me: Too bad. It’s bath time. Get upstairs.
The crocodile tears begin to flow from Cassie’s baby blues. She wails, screams, gnashes her teeth and throws herself on the ground. It’s all I can do to keep from laughing.
Cassie: Waaaaaaaah! Waaaaaaaaaaah! WAAAAAAAAAAH!
Me: I’m turning out the light and going upstairs now. See you in the tub.
Cassie: Waaaaah! Waaaaaaah! WAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
I turn out the light and head upstairs, as promised. Cassie, who hates to be left in the dark, scrambles up the stairs after me, throwing herself on the ground every third step to throw another tantrum. She keeps screaming at me, but I can no longer understand anything she says. I just keep humming and turning out the lights as I go. Eventually, Cassie makes it to the bathroom. She sobs all through getting undressed, and is still howling when she steps into the tub. When I turn on the water, she screams even louder. By now, I can no longer contain myself. I’m laughing out loud. This just pisses Cassie off even more. However, once the tub fills up, the crying stops (I knew it would). She starts splashing around, playing with her bath toys. We sing funny songs and laugh. Eventually, the bath is over, and Cassie makes it to bed with only one more minor tantrum, this one about how she hates to brush her teeth. Fortunately, Michael is home to handle that, because I think if I laugh at that kid too much more, I’m going to burst my sides.
And that’s dinner at the Madden household.
