It was a busy weekend! We spent a good part of Sunday in Ellsworth, eating lunch at Jordan’s and stopping to browse at the Big Chicken Barn. The Barn is my absolute favorite place to look for photo props and supplies… it’s full of old stuff, odd and ends, rusted tools, gadgets, gizmos, cameras, and vintage Pyrex–oh, how I love thee, vintage Pyrex. As if that wasn’t good enough, the entire upstairs is filled with used books, so I never have a problem getting Tim to come with me.

I always leave the place feeling inspired, and I rarely go away empty handed. This time I picked up a drawer full of old glass bottles… I’m obsessed with them lately. There are so many different shapes and sizes and colors.  I have a few ideas for a photo shoot involving these things. I have a lot of ideas for photo shoots, just not many people to model for me. I really need to start a search again, but I’m feeling shy. I need to get over it so I can get to work!

Overall, we had an excellent weekend with Miss Ellie, too. I know every parent says this, but I have it on good authority that my kid is the best kid ever. She was dragging me around the store at top speed (is there any other speed for a toddler?) and cackling like a mad scientist the entire time. It’s amazing how much energy she has! It’s draining sometimes, but also incredibly fun. I honestly didn’t think having a kid would be this cool. Rewarding, yes. Fulfilling, sure. But I didn’t expect to have this much fun chasing around an 18-month-old.

It helps that I’m starting to feel more like my old self–comfortable as a mom, but also as an individual with creative goals. For a while the two seemed mutually exclusive; there was just no time in the day to do everything, and obviously Ellie takes priority, so a lot of my projects were done in short spurts or put on the back-burner. Over the last six months it’s gotten easier to juggle work, Ellie, Tim, and creative projects. Ellie still needs lots of love and attention, but she’ll also play alone for longer stretches now. Tim and I are pretty good about judging when the other needs a break; he’s especially great about taking Ellie on “daddy/daughter” grocery shopping trips so I can have an hour to myself here or there. And we’ve made a point of scheduling more date nights, to remind ourselves that we’re not just parents–we’re still a couple, too. It’s a balancing act and I won’t go so far as to say I have it down, but I’ve definitely noticed an improvement!

I just realized I said I’d post pictures of the new bathroom two weeks ago and then I never did. Well, here you go:

It’s so nice to have our less-often-used stuff out of the way but easily accessible should we need it. We have plenty of room to add a third shelf and maybe some smaller shelves alongside the sink. It’s a glorified closet, but it’s DONE! Now I can focus all my worry on the other 599 projects we should be working on but aren’t.

Last week was rough, which is why I’ve been so quiet… Ellie had a cold that turned her from a sweet, darling little girl into Fussy McFusserton, Queen of Whinyland, so we spent a lot of time trying to keep her from imploding in frustration. She’s pretty much over it, but now I have a pesky sore throat and the sniffles. It just goes to show that sharing is caring. Hello, Caro, and welcome to Whinyland!

I’m itching to pick up my camera and play with some new photo props I bought at the Big Chicken Barn several weeks ago, but between bathroom renovations and sickness and custom work, I haven’t been in the right frame of mind. I’m taking a few days off this week, though, so hopefully I can shake this cold quickly and get some work done.

We’ve been in the midst of home renovations this week, and it’s finally (mostly) over. After three days, and with only a couple minor roadblocks, our contractor put in new floors, patched the walls, and installed a laundry sink.

This probably sounds like a weekend DIY project to some people… but we are not those people. Don’t get me wrong–Tim’s handy in the sense that he can probably rig some kind of quick fix in a pinch if something breaks, but we’re not “Hey, let’s totally remodel this room because we haven’t done that in at least six months and we have three hours to spare” kinda people.

Just to give you a sense of where we fall on the Homeowner’s Laziness Spectrum. *ahem*

Given our position on said spectrum, I surprised myself a little when, the day after the contractor finished, I suggested to Tim that we head to Home Depot to look at paint chips and shelving for the new room. You may or may not remember, but it took six people and several months just to finish Ellie’s room. The bathroom project is much smaller and less complicated, but still, I figured we’d get around to painting it sometime in the next, oh, six years.

But then I saw the paint chips and thought, “To hell with it–I’m going to get it done this weekend.” And by “I” I mean “we” and by “we” I mean “Tim, I’m going to make you do all the trim because I hate the detail work.”

Several hours, one temper tantrum and a gigantic mess later, we have a pretty blue bathroom instead of lime green.

We also have a pretty blue kitchen sink and some pretty blue clothes, a pretty blue cat and hey look! My hair, it’s pretty! And blue! And despite getting paint over every square inch of ourselves and our kitchen, I think we have enough left over to do the upstairs bathroom tomorrow–because obviously I’m high on the fumes to want to do this again.

Here’s a quick before-and-after look:

(The idea is to turn this into an over-sized closet/pantry area that also happens to have a toilet. Once the paint dries we’ll put shelves above the toilet and next to the laundry sink, enabling us to free up some much-needed cabinet space in our pretty blue kitchen. I’ll post more pics when it’s complete.)

It’s been a good week for business. This morning my shops were on the front page of Etsy, thanks to an excellent Maine treasury curated by atelierfrost. Prior to that, my “rescue” doodle was the Pick of the Week at Illustration Friday, one of my Firefox Personas is currently featured on the front page of the official Personas Web site, and to top it all off, I have a photo in the brand new Regretsy book.

Obviously I’m excited about the excellent press, but there’s nothing like a one-year-old to keep you grounded and living in the moment. Ellie doesn’t care about my self-perceived success, as long as I can still read “Hop on Pop” and sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” (both of which I’ve done, endlessly, this weekend). It’s hard to tend to an inflated ego when you’re scraping two-day-old banana off the floor, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve also been exhausted all week. Sometimes it seems like I can’t catch my breath with everything that needs to be done, and there’s always something new to add to the list. Thankfully, Tim and I managed to carve out a couple hours for a night out on Saturday. We decided to see Date Night with the idea we could use a few good laughs, and the movie totally delivered on that promise.  Steve Carrel and Tiny Fey have excellent on-screen chemistry.

We also hung out with Danielle, who got me off my ass when all I wanted to do was sit and stare at my computer until my brain melted and leaked out my ears.  Thanks to her, I had the excellent good fortune to try beer-battered asparagus (OMG so yummy) and lemon cake with pudding and berries. I am absolutely stuffed.

Tonight, I’m going to turn in early and try to catch up on sleep. Tomorrow starts another busy week!

We initially made plans with Danielle to hang out on Saturday and do some serious barbequeing in this lovely spring weather. That in and of itself was great, but Danielle took it a step further by surprising us with a guest. We had the pleasure of hanging out with this dude for the weekend:

That’s right–Danielle drove all the way to Boston and back on Friday afternoon to pick up my brother and bring him to see us. On a whim. We hadn’t seen Julian since Christmas, so this was a huge surprise. Excuse me while I gush, but I have the best friends and family ever.

As soon as I’d finished hyperventilating, we were off to the supermarket to grab supplies for a feast of epic proportions. We planned the menu as we went: Hamburgers, hot dogs, honey chicken tenders, potato salad, garden salad, potatoes with fried onions & cheese and deviled eggs. It was basically a heart attack on a plate and it was delicious.

After we’d stuffed ourselves silly, Tim offered to stay home with Ellie so Danielle, Julian and I could go to a movie. We decided on Hot Tub Time Machine, which turned out to be surprisingly funny. Dumb, but I laughed a lot, which is more than I can say for most of the other movies I’ve seen recently.

We didn’t have any special plans for the next day, but we did do a little Easter egg hunt for Ellie. She was a good sport about it, although she kept giving us looks as if to say, “Uhh, what’s the big deal, guys? I find stuff all over the house all the time.” It was entirely worth it to see the look on her face when she realized the eggs had chocolates in them. She doesn’t get many sweet treats, so finding 4 M&M’s in an egg probably seemed like hitting the jackpot.

All in all, an excellent weekend with some of my favorite people. I am so blessed!

I’ve been participating in Illustration Friday over at the Calobee Doodles blog, and I’m enjoying it immensely. It’s keeps me motivated to doodle at least one thing every week. Follow me there if you’re into that sort of thing!

We’re spending the weekend at my folks, but before we left, we tried to get some photos of Elspeth and I. Looking at her baby album now, you’d think she was motherless. But it was the end of a long day for all of us, Elspeth was restless and cranky and wanted nothing to do with this particular photo shoot. So here I am with my daughter, in the one picture that worked from a whole series of blurry, poorly lit and pouty (Elspeth, not me) photos. Many thanks to Tim for putting up with us!

Last week was Mold Week here at Casa de Moore. Tim discovered a huge colony of the black stuff lurking in Ellie’s closet under her dresser, the product of a plumbing leak that initially seemed harmless enough, but turned out to be kind of a bitch. The leak itself was an easy, inexpensive fix, but the previously unseen damage added up.

Not wanting to take chances with our health, we immediately called in a cleaning specialist to help with the mold. His advice was to remove anything that could easily be removed, scrub the rest down with dish soap and water, and speed-dry it–so that’s exactly what we did this weekend! And by “we,” I mean Tim–my job was to wrangle the baby and worry about how much the repairs would cost (worrying is one of my many useless super powers). When Tim had to take up the linoleum in the downstairs bathroom due to moisture and black gunk underneath, it dawned on me that this “little project” was going to be a bigger pain than I’d thought.

I take the Total Denial approach to home repairs. If I ignore the problem long enough, maybe it will go away on its own. This works perfectly in theory–ignoring things I don’t want to think about is another one of my super powers–but not so well in practice. This is why Ellie’s closet is now missing its carpet, and the downstairs bathroom looks like… well, like hell. It’s missing the bottom part of its wall, a baseboard, a third of the ceiling and about half the linoleum. All because of a “harmless” little leak I hoped would fix itself. Hah-hah.

But in a fit of positivity, we decided to turn this into a good thing and make some necessary changes. Our condo was built in the 80′s, and boy, does it show (think rose pink bathroom fixtures and beige faux-tile vinyl) so replacing the bathroom floors is a worthwhile investment.  The flooring itself is free–my parents have a leftover piece from their first bathroom remodel that should fit our 5′x7′ room.  We’re also going to tear out the bathroom’s clunky, water-damaged vanity and replace it with a practical laundry sink. This will give us more room to put up shelves, so the half-bath will become a combination bathroom and walk-in storage closet. As much as I dread any kind of disruption in my home, I’m excited to have a functional storage area.

Consider these your “before” pictures. Hopefully I’ll soon have a much-improved bathroom to show you!

We’ve been long overdue for a date night, so this weekend T and I left Danielle to fend off the vicious baby-beast for a few hours while we enjoyed an evening to ourselves. It started with dinner at one of the six billion steakhouses in the greater Bangor area, where the hostess, mistaking us for sports fans, seated us on wobbly bar stools inches from a giant flat-screen TV that was blaring something about football. How… romantic? I had an internal debate with myself–do I want to be one of “those” people and ask to move, or should I suck it up and deal with it?  I decided on the former, because as I told Tim, if I wanted to eat steak in a rickety chair next to a giant TV, I could do it at home–and for much less! But once we were settled in a booth, the crab-stuffed filet and the pomegranate margarita more than made up for it.

Dinner was followed by the late showing of Alice in Wonderland, during which I could barely keep my eyes open. I literally nodded off four times. It could have been the result of being up past my bedtime, but honestly, I don’t think so. The 3-D made me dizzy (odd, I don’t usually have that problem), the characters were flat, the pace was rushed and the story felt sloppy. Our movie choices recently have been hit or miss, leaning more toward the “miss” side of things. Oh well. If nothing else, it got us out of the house for a few hours!

In unrelated news, it’s been a while since I’ve posted gratuitous baby photos, so here you go. Insert lamentation about how fast she’s growing, how I wish she’d stay little for longer, how I can’t believe she’s almost 15 months old, yadda yadda yadda. I’m too entranced with her sweet face and those adorable pudgy cheeks to be coherent about it.

I probably jinxed myself by writing my sick post so early in the season, but I spent the weekend sleeping and cuddling with my new friend, the toilet. The toilet isn’t all that cuddly, actually, but I didn’t have much choice in the matter. I think the bathtub is jealous of our new, special relationship, but I can’t say I’m all that thrilled about it. The toilet is kinda clingy and co-dependent, and I’ve seen far too much of him in the last two months.

And no, I’m not pregnant! I’m just unlucky enough to have the pleasure of two stomach viruses in two months. Yay, me. At least the toilet’s getting some action.

Before The Sick fell upon me yet again, I worked up this little woodlands doodle. I freely admit to tracing from a photograph the deer you see in the distance, because I got frustrated when my version looked like hunchback aliens with tentacles for legs. I was reminded why I don’t draw for real–like with pen and paper–because I suck at it! Yes, I’m an illustrator who’s totally dependent on Illustrator. There’s a reason I use the word “doodles” instead of “drawings” or “illustrations,” and Attack of the Killer Alien Deer from Outer Space is one of them. Frolic away, little woodsy creatures, knowing you’re safe from my poor non-existent hand-eye coordination!

Last weekend was a whirlwind of creative energy. So many ideas! So many new things I want to try! I’m blaming the strangely warm weather we’ve had this February. It’s pulled me out of my winter funk and straight into spring mania (I don’t have the heart to tell my muse it’s not really spring yet).

First things first–I got new glasses on Friday, and I am in love with them. They are purple and just geeky enough to be “me.” I tried to get a self-portrait but I am so out of practice I couldn’t do their awesomeness justice, so I’ll have to wait until Tim can help me. In the meantime, these are my new frames–I think “spiffy” is the appropriate word here.

Second, I’ve been doodling like mad since last Wednesday, and I’m ordering no less than 15 test prints from my printer this week (!!!)  That’s an insane amount of new work for me. I wrote about the new “numbers” colorways (above), and I took a few minutes to put up a new banner in the Calobee Doodles shop. There are several new prints and products coming soon, too! And I’ve been chipping away at custom orders amidst everything else, so all in all, I’m kind of floored by my own productivity. Where did this crazy-high-energy person come from? Can I keep her?

Finally, on Sunday we hung out with our long-lost friend Danielle and played lots of Wii. Tim picked up Super Mario Bros., which brought me back to my childhood–I spent many hours watching my brother play Super Nintendo, all the while yelling at him to go left, right, go back and get that coin, you missed a pipe, etc. I’m not only a backseat driver–I’m a backseat gamer. I can’t boss Tim around like I used to my bro, but it’s not for lack of trying.

All this fun and I didn’t even have to leave the house! Now, I must keep up with this productive streak and get back to work.