Playin' around with crayons

Christ is Risen! Indeed He is Risen! Greetings on this Bright Monday. The sun is shining, the day promises to be summer-like, and it is a great start to the Paschal season. We spent the latter half of Holy Week and Pascha (Easter) in Princeton as we usually do, to celebrate with our parish there. Our boys stayed up through the midnight service and through the early morning celebrations! (Well, the baby took a brief nap in the middle of the liturgy around 1 a.m., but he was up the rest of the time!) We got back to our hotel around 5:00 a.m. and I've never been so grateful for black out curtains in my life! We all slept about four hours, and then headed off to a friend's house for a Paschal brunch, and then home. All in all, a lovely weekend and a great Pascha celebration with our church family.

I had an unexpectedly eventful morning today. I had my routine monthly midwifery appointment at 9:30, and ended up waiting in the room for more than an hour before the midwife got there. I had woken up with another blistering headache (they've been plaguing me almost daily for the last month and Tylenol doesn't even take the edge off), and while I was sitting there, I could just feel myself feeling sicker and sicker. I couldn't get enough air in my lungs because my nose was so congested with hormones and such, and my head was pounding enough to make me dizzy and seeing spots. So I mentioned these things, along with the rather extreme fatigue I've been experiencing the last week or so, and, after she listened to the baby's heartbeat on the doppler (a strong 154 beats per minute!), she said, "Get thee to prenatal triage at the hospital!" Luckily the hospital is only a few blocks away on foot, but after waiting an hour at the office, and needing to run several errands this morning, going to the prenatal triage unit at the hospital at 11 a.m. was no on my agenda. But I went, they gave me some stronger meds for the headache, which helped quite a bit (still there, but much more a background noise than the main concert at this point). She didn't want to do anything about the short breathing, but at least an unexpected side effect of the medication was to ease some of the congestion in my face. So while the breathing isn't great, it is better. I was able to run my errands in double quick time on my way home, and got home by 2 p.m. My lovely long suffering babysitter was gracious to stay late, so everything worked out well.

Today's card is one I made in March while playing around with the crayon resist technique. It didn't quite turn out like what I had envisioned in my head, but I think I know what I will fix in the future if I make it again. What I should have done was put the white crayon in the middle areas and left the rims and edges dark, as if it was a rusty old truck. Oh well. That's what experiments are for, right? It is a rather nice masculine card. I'm saving it for Father's Day.


I also just had to share this photo from Spring Fling--it comes from my upline, Claire's, blog, but I think April Boyea, one of our fellow Philly Inkers, took the photo. I'm demonstrating how to make my cowboy lightening card.

(Yes, that is a cheap-o gas station French Vanilla cappuccino--I don't want to hear anything about it! :)