IF: Yield.

Pin It Four is an incredible age for making friends, isn’t it? Social awkwardness doesn’t exist. Everyone is a friend, indiscriminately, within five seconds of meeting. And because all four-year-olds are oblivious to how incredibly dorky they are, everyone is cool completely by accident. Girls don’t even have cooties yet!

I kind of hope that once Matthew’s old enough to be afraid of girls, that a little bit of that nervousness around them never goes away. Because if he remains as much of a flirt in his adolescence as he is without knowing it now, we are in BIG trouble.



Illustration Friday:
This blog has always been a collection of stories from our family life, and I want from now on to keep the illustrations I do on here more tightly based on exactly that: the stories I tell about us. My aim with this week’s challenge was to try to break out of the true-to-life spectrum a little more; something I apparently love way too much to give up with any ease. I kept my doodles doodlish, and I wanted every element to feel more loose and spontaneous than I would normally make them. I would have gone with more of a comic-book type layout but it turns out that I have no idea how to do that yet. Who knew? That’s what I love most about this weekly challenge though… finding out how much of what you thought you’d be pretty good at, you aren’t. And then tackling it to the ground until you are.

Last year one of my favorite illustrator’s, Abigail Haplin gave herself an interesting illustration challenge: to document her life comic style every week for a year. It came about as a way for her to try her hand at a new form of art -- something she wasn’t entirely comfortable with when she started. (You should definitely check it out.. I’m kind of in love.) Sequential art is way out of my own artistic league, but where’s the challenge in sticking to only what you already know, right? Illustration Friday, for me, will always be a place to test new waters.

Even though I had pretty much no idea what I was doing here, I had fun putting this together, and as soon as I’m not busy tending to a house that’s been ravaged by two merciless stomach viruses in a single month, I’ll come back to this and repost whatever it is I come up with. Until then, at least I got my feet wet doing something with which I am devastatingly unfamiliar, and can say that week two of IF participation is down for the count. Sometimes it's about the little victories..