Hello, Morning.

I was reading a post by The Happy Hausfrau (do you read her blog? you should, she's wonderful and I love her) and she was talking about how with her new job, two of her kids are now fully responsible for getting up on their own and getting out the door in the mornings. And I thought, OMG I need to tell the blogosphere that I, too, have started forcing the kids to get up and out the door in the mornings on their very own.

Almost.

The boys are so good at getting up and getting out the door. Bug and Goober both get up, get dressed, and get out the door without me even opening my eyes. This is the first year that this has happened. For the last decade I have woken up at some unholy hour and driven at least one child to at least one school. Because of my night owl schedule, waking up before 8 am has always really been painful for me. So I would wake up around 6:30, wake the kids up, drive kids wherever, drive home and then go back to sleep for a couple more hours. It was so painful and so unhealthy and ended up forcing me to actually sleep more than necessary because I wasn't sleeping straight through.

But now that the boys are getting themselves up and out of the house I've had the luxury of sleeping a full 8 hours every night. It has been like heaven, y'all. I'm so darn refreshed most of the time. (And if not, a little coffee does the trick.)

Munchkin, however, sleeps peacefully until I wake her. And if I don't wake her, she doesn't wake. It's a curse that we both have - this inability to wake up in the mornings. When I was a teenager it was so hard to wake me up that my dad bought me an alarm clock that literally said "The World's Loudest Alarm Clock" on the package (and yes, it really WAS the loudest alarm clock.)

Munchkin doesn't have to be at school until after 9 am because middle school starts ridiculously late in our district (which also means it gets out stupid late, which is a whole other blog post). Since the boys are already out of the house before she even opens her princess eyes, she would peacefully slumber until noon if I let her.

So I wake up every morning by 8 am and I pitter patter across the house to wake up my sleeping beauty. It's actually really a good thing because I'm sure if I didn't have to wake her up I'd just sleep all day and nothing would ever get done around here. But this new schedule we've been on is pretty perfect. Get this, I'm even waking up around 8 on weekends. What??? Seeing the mornings is a whole new experience for me y'all. It's enlightening.

Personal Fitness, Trash Hands, Cold Fronts, and Etsy Sucks

Raising three children is a full time job. Double full time, really. In fact, I don't have time to write this post because I should most definitely be doing other things.

But procrastination is my middle name, so here goes.

This morning I learned that Bug is failing Personal Fitness. Yep, failing P.E... this is happening. Because P.E. isn't just running around the track and doing some sit-ups anymore. Now there are tests and quizzes and homework. A lot of them, in fact. And I guess Bug must think they are total BS, too, because he hasn't done many of them.

Bug has quizzes to take about flexibility and muscle endurance and what he should eat. I guess it's like Health class and P.E. all wrapped into one. His teacher says in her email this morning that Bug needs to make Personal Fitness his priority. Somehow I think his Algebra and Language Arts teachers might disagree but I'm not responding to that.

The other night raccoons got into the garbage in front of the house. Yesterday morning I woke up to little nasty pieces of our trash all over the front yard. Naturally I had the kids clean it up because, ew, I'm not touching it and if I can't get these kids to do the dirty work for me then what did I have them for?

Two minutes after the three of them were sent out to do the nasty job of picking it all up, Munchkin came in crying because Goober had "rubbed his disgusting TRASH hands all over me!!" So I excused her from doing anymore and sent her to take a shower.

The Man told me that she gets out of doing everything and I told him that if someone rubbed their disgusting trash hands all over me I'd be done, too.  Gross.

At dinner last night, Goober smiled and said it was worth it even if she did get out of picking up the rest of the trash. So I guess it was a win-win.

This past weekend South Florida experienced its first real cold front of the season. I had to put on socks and drag out my hoodie. That's cold for us down here. To celebrate we had our first fire of the season and I discovered Johnny Walker on the rocks is a nice sipping drink if it's cold outside.

Speaking of scrap wood, we had a bit of a hiccup this weekend with The Man's business. Since our primary income from his beautiful sign making business came from Etsy, we were sort of at their whim. I don't know if you remember back in the day when I was selling Fifty Shades of Grey shirts on Etsy, but they didn't take kindly to that and shut my store down. They didn't just shut that store down, though - they shut down that store and the store where I sold Girl Scout shirts down, too. Because they didn't even want to be associated with the likes of me. Geesh, Etsy.  

So when The Man started making his beautiful signs (check them out on Facebook for the time being!), we were a little nervous about putting them on Etsy. We put them in The Man's name and his bank information and for a long time everything seemed to be fine. Until we woke up Friday to a nice note from Etsy telling us to piss off. No appeal process available.

It's been a bit of a bummer, but we've been through this kind of thing before, obviously, and come out the other side even better. My Girl Scout shirts sell way better on our own site than they ever did on Etsy so we know that with a lot of hard work and marketing, The Man's beautiful signs will do just fine on their own site, too. 

So that's what we've been up to the past several days - just building our brand new site to feature our beautiful signs. It's not entirely ready yet, we still have a lot of editing to do and products to add - but it is functional and technically it all works. It's a labor of love, I guess. :) 

Where the Spaz just about reaches the end of her fundraising rope

I'm deep in the trenches of fundraising. Deep in the trenches and losing air, y'all.

In the past month I feel like all I do is peddle one thing or another to support schools, bands, trips and scouts. We're peddling candles, popcorn, nuts, candy, magazines, wrapping paper, cookie dough, and garbage bags (yep, not kidding - garbage bags). There's probably more I'm not thinking of because at least one fundraiser packet just went directly into the trash - all of it overpriced and none of it necessary for your existence... well, except maybe the garbage bags but at the price you'd hate to throw them out.

This is the time when the Girl Scouts do their annual nut and candy sale. We call it Fall Product and it's an alternative to back in the day when they used to sell calendars (something people actually needed). Typically, our troop isn't big on the fall product sales but we do sell cookies after the holidays. This is also the time when Boy Scouts are selling popcorn for the unheard of price of $10 a bag.

Though this year I'm seriously considering just throwing my hands up to all of it.

Maybe it's because I have three kids and there's a lot of fundraising to be done, maybe it's because I'm just burnt out, maybe it's because people are starting to run the other way when they see me coming - but I have had enough, y'all. ENOUGH.

I have given my weekends to sitting outside of grocery stores and banks urging my sweet little children to smile and say "have a nice day" even when people rudely avert their eyes and walk past them in their scout uniforms. I have sent out the emails, I've posted the facebook posts, I've called my friends and family.

At least with some of these products a decent amount does go back to the kids, but the worst of all returns is the Girl Scouts. GSUSA and our council, GSSEF (and please, know that this organization has my heart for what the individual troop leaders do for these girls) literally has girls working for pennies on the dollar while their CEOs take six digit salaries. Our girls barely make enough money to plan a nice field trip.

Like I said earlier, we typically sell cookies. They're kind of a tradition and yes, the cookie sale does teach Munchkin some business skills. (FYI - our girls get 60 cents out of that $4 you shell out for cookies, a 15% return). However, we typically pass on this Fall Product sale.

This year Munchkin is in 8th grade which puts her in her final year as a Cadette. She wants to earn her Silver Award this year and she, and her Silver Team of three other girls have come up with a great plan of action. Today I was told that if Munchkin doesn't participate in the Fall Product sale she won't be eligible for her Silver Award.

I'm still chewing on this big fat wad of black venom.

If I find this to be true there may be a whole other post coming up.

At any rate, if you need anything - anything at all - and you feel like overpaying for it, leave me a comment and I'll probably be able to sell it to you for a highly inflated price. :)

Weight Loss Woes

I've been doing this diet thing.... and OMG it has sucked.

It started being the Dukan Diet. You can read all about it somewhere. Use Google. You'll pull up a ton on it.

At any rate, I started the Dukan Diet last Wednesday. If you've Googled at all, you know it starts with what they call the "Attack Phase" where you eat nothing but protein. You can have all the lean meat and fat free dairy you want. That's the basic principle.

It worked, y'all. I lost 7 pounds on the Attack Phase. Seven pounds in five days. Something definitely attacked something. My pants fit better.

So yesterday and today I moved on to the "Cruise Phase" where you get to basically do the exact same thing as the Attack Phase except every other day you can have veggies.  Yesterday I got to have veggies and then today I felt like I was being punished and had to move back to that viscous Attack Phase.

So tonight after I fed the family sloppy joes and mac & cheese and then fixed myself an egg white omelet with turkey and a cup of fat free greek yogurt for dinner I decided I needed to reevaluate.

I am miserable. I am snapping at the kids. I am feeling desperate for different foods.

You see, I have a lot of weight to lose. It's not like I can just do this Dukan Diet for a month or two, lose 15 or 20 pounds and move on - if I stick with Dukan for the full amount of weight loss, I will not get to eat a piece of fruit for the next year. Is that possibly even okay to do?  And even if it is okay, do I want to be feeling deprived because I can't have an orange for a year?

Nope.

So I revised my Dukan Diet to something I can live with.

Here it is (if you care):

YES LIST:
Unlimited lean proteins and non-starchy vegetables
Unlimited super low fat dairy (less than 2% fat)
One piece of fruit per day
Up to 2 slices of whole grain bread per day
One serving (about 2 ounces) of cheese per day
Up to 5 sugar free treats per day (Jello, a piece of gum, a diet soda, etc)
Two low calorie alcoholic beverages a week
One reasonable celebration meal per week.
Very small amounts of oil for cooking

NO LIST (except for in celebration meal - use discretion with celebration meal!):
White bread
White rice
Pasta
Whole fat dairy
Starchy vegetables
Potatoes
Full sugar desserts

**Must drink 64 ounces of water each day**

Exercise has to be up, too. Walking at least 1 mile per day has to happen. I can also do counter push ups, crunches, and squats every day. When I've lost some more weight I plan to add in yoga. Exercise has to happen every single day. No breaks. Even if it's just a walk, something has to happen.

I'm going to ask The Man to take some before pictures and I might even post them. Later. Like - when I can look back at them and think "Wow, I've come so far."

Not now.

Let's see how this goes.

I am guilty.

I spend a decent amount of time reading blogs and essays written by other moms. Moms who love their children as much as I do, moms who work just as hard, moms who would lay down their lives for their babies. Every mother can tell the story of each and every one of their babies - how they came to be, how they were born, and how they are loved. Sadly, so many mothers can also tell the stories of how their babies were lost.

Our world, as beautiful and wonderful as it is, is also relentless in its cruelty. Mamas should never lose their babies. 

I have not lost any of my babies and I feel such incredible guilt. Why do I still get to watch my children grow every day when another mother is forced to mourn her child? I am not better or more righteous than any mother. I do not deserve my children any more than anyone else. 

The other day I got to watch Munchkin as she rode her favorite horse, Thunder, during one of her weekly ride times. I don't often do this - always busy running errands or working - sometimes I sit in the car while she rides and play with my phone, calling it "me" time. My heart is always a little in my throat when she rides. She is fearless and beautiful and she amazes me as runs and sails over jumps. My head churns as I watch her. "Please don't fall. Please take care of my baby, Thunder. Please don't fall."  Because Mamas have lost their babies doing less dangerous things. 

A few months ago she was thrown off her horse and her head hit a tree. Her riding helmet cracked in the front, right where her frontal lobe is. She was a little bumped up, but otherwise fine, and just as I've always told her to do, she got right back on the horse. I'm thankful I wasn't watching her that day.

I watch all three of them take chances, they climb to the highest branch, swim past where the waves are breaking, fall off their skateboards, and do wheelies on their bikes. They are kids and they act just like kids are supposed to act. 

They are healthy, they are happy, they are smart. They have everything going for them and I feel like I hit the kid lottery with how great my babies are. They are all alive and I get to see them all every day. I get to listen to their problems and hug them and hold them and watch them grow. 

I am guilty and my heart aches for those mothers who don't get to hold their babies when they cry and don't get to watch them grow from babies to young ladies and men. Mine are healthy and happy and smart - and I am guilty.

Merry Go Rounds, Rusty Slides, and Polar Cups

(This post is inspired by a post from Jenny From The Blog.)

I'm pretty sure our population is only going to get stupider.

We're defying Darwin with all of our idiot proofing ways and in the next few generations I'm fairly sure we're going to have a bunch of morons bumbling around the planet knocking their heads on sharp corners and falling off of curbs.

My kids don't know what a merry-go-round is. When I mentioned a merry-go-round, they thought I was talking about a carousel complete with horses and benches and lights and music.

Carousels are boring, y'all.

You know what's not boring? A merry-go-round.

Think back to when you were a kid and you played on one of these babies. It was made out of hot metal that had been baking in the sun and you had to pull your shorts down a little and sit all funny on it so none of your bare skin touched the metal and gave you 3rd degree burns. If you were lucky, you had a cool adult with you who would push it really hard and you'd cling to the bars to avoid flying off and going airborne only to get a mouth full of playground sand (because we had sand, not mulch or AstroTurf or bouncy rubbery crap made from recycled tires).  If you didn't have an adult with you (because lots of times you were at the playground without an adult - this happened), you might convince another kid to push it, but mostly you'd get it going as fast as you could and then you'd fling yourself on to the hot, dirty surface and ride it until it stopped - eyes closed, head bobbing around, stomach reeling - it was pure joy.

When I was a kid, the playground was not the reason we were at the park, either. We were at the park because of some family function. Probably a picnic or a BBQ and the reason I was at the playground was because I bugged my parents until one of them said "go play"... and I did.

Sometimes my dad and older sister would play tennis at one of our local parks and I'd go along just to play on the playground. I would walk unsupervised to a playground in this park that was so surrounded by trees and foliage that no one would have ever seen if I had been kidnapped.  I would swing and slide and merry-go-round, usually without an adult in sight, for as long as I could.  And then my dad would take us all to go get a Polar Cup.

You wish you could have a Polar Cup right now.

But I have digressed.

I survived merry-go-rounds and rusty geodesic domes and broken slides and playgrounds where no adult was present. Because I wasn't an idiot. I knew that I could get hurt so I didn't do stupid stuff that would get me hurt. I didn't try to surf the merry-go-round by standing on the handrails and telling another kid to spin it. Other kids did, I watched one break his arm once. We all learned a valuable lesson that day.

But now our kids play on cushioned playgrounds coated with nerf and rubber. There are no sharp edges and no rusty nails and no surfaces that will burn their precious skin. Our homes are baby proofed and our lids are child proofed and our 5 year-olds are riding to kindergarten in car seats.

Every 12 year old has a cell phone and we'd rather they stay inside playing video games after school than ride their bikes to the neighborhood park without us watching their every move. We hover and fret and if they fall we're right there to pick them up and dust them off and kiss their booboos.

And they're growing up to be wimps.

But if you try to fight it, if you try to let your kids have that freedom to learn and grow and fall down and pick themselves up, you're shamed and judged. Or worse, some other parent does it for you. As if the worst thing in the world is my 10 year-old out riding his bike while I'm at home folding his laundry.

It's time to cut the umbilical cord and let our babies go, y'all.

Things I learned from Facebook today

Did you know you can make homemade creamer? Like - instead of buying a chemical concoction to put in your coffee every morning, you can just make your own and not have it be like pouring a carcinogen down your throat every day.

You mix 1 can of sweetened condensed milk with 2 cups of milk and whatever extracts you want in there to flavor it (almond, vanilla, cinnamon, whatev) and BAM! Delicious coffee creamer. Probably costs less, too.

***

American Apparel should probably pay closer attention to what gets Tweeted and Tumbled by their 19 year old employees. Oops. Way to celebrate our Independence, AA!

***

This one was interesting and totally had me going - but it was proved false by about.com. 

Onions are crazy toxin absorbents. So if you're sick, you should slice one and put it in your sock and it will make you better. Evidently this can work against you if you slice an onion and then put it in your fridge to save. It will absorb all the toxins in the fridge (do our fridges have a lot of toxins in them?) and then you'll eat it on your burger or whatever.

Too bad that's not true. 

***

People love to take pictures of their feet while laying in hammocks. A lot of them make these pictures their profile picture. I think they're trying to make everyone else jealous - but I'm not fooled. It's napalm hot outside right now, I'd rather be in here in my air conditioning than on any beach with my feet in a hammock.

***

Grasshoppers are loaded with protein. And people eat worms. Lots of worms. Gross.

***

Holy jeez, I have to try this. We have mangoes coming out of our eyeballs around here every summer and cutting them is super messy. Figures I don't have even one whole mango in the house right now.

***

If this is any indication, tests to become a US Citizen are way easier than I thought they'd be.

***

So much about poop. But I totally learned some stuff.

The Spaz prepares for her 1st kid to go to high school.

I found some pictures of Bug today when I was cleaning out some boxes from my old office and my heart just melted. My first baby, Bug saved me. Bug forced me to grow up, to put someone else's needs before my own, to start taking responsibility for myself and to make decisions that would benefit him. Before Bug it was all keggers and parties til the sun came up.

Before Bug came along I barely gave a thought to the future. I knew that one day I'd probably need to think about all that stuff - but it seemed so far away and so unimportant. The only thing I really cared about was not missing out on any fun. Ever. I was barely 22 when I discovered that Bug was growing inside of me and something immediately changed with that positive pregnancy test. My friends were still kids, my boyfriend was still a kid, but I was immediately not a kid.

I was a really, really stupid adult.

Not every decision I made after that was a good one - but every decision I made after that was for Bug.

I can remember so clearly the first moments Bug and I had together at home for the first time. My mother brought us home from the hospital because my then husband was working. She helped me carry my newborn and all of the stuff from the hospital into the living room of the little townhouse we lived in and she helped me get comfortable on the couch. And then she left. With barely a kiss goodbye, she left the two of us alone. For the first time ever.

And I looked at my brand new son sleeping in my lap and I was overwhelmed with my need to provide him with the entire world.  We lived on that couch for the first week of his life. A small bassinet next to me, trying to breastfeed and change diapers and sleep and memorize every detail of his little squishy baby face. Those first days are a blur now, but I have never shaken the feeling of ferocious protectiveness I had when I first became a mother.

This year Bug goes to high school. He is FOURTEEN. He'll be (hold me, I'm feeling faint) 15 before 2014 is through.

Do you remember being fifteen? For me it was a year that changed who I was. It was the year I officially went from nice kid to anarchist. I am not ready for a fifteen year old.

Bug's voice is deep and he has hair in weird places. He's going to have to start shaving soon. He wears men's clothing and shoes and uses copious amounts of Axe body spray.  He is obsessed with his computer and the world it connects him to. He writes programming for things I can't understand and sleeps until 2 in the afternoon.

It has not always been an easy journey with Bug and we're just getting started with the rocky teenage road that lies ahead of us. I'm hoping with all that I can hope that Bug finds his way this next four years of high school. I'm hoping he can start seeing that his future matters and maybe start making decisions for future Bug.

He's a brilliant, funny, genuinely good person, my Bug. He is blessed with a heart big enough for everyone who crosses his path and a brain smart enough to take over the world.

Rainbows and kittens and butterflies and flowers

When I was little I fell in love with Haley Mills. Well, not Haley Mills to be exact - but her character, Pollyanna.

My mom must have recorded it for me on VHS because I watched Pollyanna over and over again, memorizing the words and most of all - playing The Glad Game. 

The Glad Game may have irritated all members of Harrington in the Disney movie - but it spoke to me and I played it in my head all the time.

I'm not sure at what age I stopped playing The Glad Game, but it wasn't until I started The Happiness Project that in addition to writing down 3 positive things that happen to me every day, I was playing the game all over again.

Crappy things happen and I try to figure out what's good about them. And it certainly makes things easier to swallow.

I'm two weeks into The Happiness Project and I'm happy to say that it really has improved my state of mind. The first thing I noticed when writing 3 things down every night is that some days it is really difficult to narrow it down. So many great things happen to me every day that trying to pick 3 can be tough. And that's a problem to be glad about right there.

I'm still loving my art journal and have been creating in it most days. Not every day because life is pretty busy with 3 kids home over the summer - but most days I do find some time to put some color down in my journal. I took the time to set up a space for creating and I'm happy to say it's getting a lot of use.

I even picked up a smaller journal for Munchkin because she was having so much fun using the art table that she really needed a place to put her own ideas down to paper. The Man is having a hard time finding something good to say about all the glitter that we've been using and how it's slowly spreading throughout the house in tiny little specks of joy, but Munchkin and I are having a blast.

I highly recommend you putting together one of your own. No one would ever need therapy if everyone just started playing The Glad Game and painting in a book once in a while.

I need more glitter

I have always loved art. 

And maybe every little kid does - I know my kids always loved crayons and markers and putting colors to pages. 

But I was sort of obsessed with it. 

One of my mother's very best friends, Ginger, worked in the Gifts department of Halsey & Griffith. If you grew up in West Palm Beach in the 80s, you may have visited this amazing store of delights as a child. It was touted as an office supply store - but it was so much more than that. It was located in a 3 story building in downtown West Palm Beach, the kind of downtown where you had to parallel park on the street and get your parking validated at the store. 

On the first floor was office supplies. To this day I could get lost in an office supply store. All the files and folders and pencils and hard cover notebooks, oh my! Also on the first floor was a gift section, similar to a Hallmark. There were greeting cards and little stuffed animals and trinkets you could purchase and if you asked nicely Ginger would take your purchase into the back and gift wrap it so perfectly in such beautiful paper that you absolutely would feel like it was a shame to tear it open. My mother would spend hours chatting with Ginger while I looked around the store. Perusing the new stuff that came in, looking at the stickers, flipping through the book that held sample wedding invitation templates for brides-to-be to come in and order.  

Halsey & Griffith was seriously a store from another era. 

When I got a bit older and my mother trusted that I could behave myself, she said "Beth, why don't you take the elevator up to the 2nd floor and look around up there."

Second floor? I had never been to the second floor. I knew there was an elevator - I'd seen people get on and off of it before. But I had never gone in it and I had no idea what was on the second floor. I was a pretty brave kid, I guess, because now that I think about it if I told Munchkin to just jump on an elevator and go somewhere she had never ever been before by herself she would absolutely freak out. There's no WAY that kid would go. But me? I happily ran over to the elevator and pressed the button. I had no clue what wonders would await me.

The elevator was old. It smelled funny in there and it was hot. This was probably 1985 and I'm sure that elevator had been in operation for at least 30 years before then. But my mind was preoccupied with the destination rather than the journey. What the hell was going to be on the second floor? I mashed the button with a 2 on it and held my breath.

The elevator struggled to ascend to the 2nd floor and grunted when it stopped. With a cheerful "bing!" the doors opened and I stepped out into a little hallway. To my left was nothing, just a blank wall. I looked to my right and y'all I heard angels singing.

It was my utopia. 

It was a real, honest-to-goodness art supply store. Filled with real, honest-to-goodness art supplies. For real artists. There was no Crayola or Rose Art in here. There were things I had never seen before in my whole little life. Oil pastels and books of paper made just for drawing and painting, canvases, paint brushes, pencils of every shape and size. I had no idea there were so many colors of paint and so many types of paint and so many ways to apply paint. I was delirious with it. 

That day my mother bought me a set of Pentel Oil Pastels and a real artist's sketchbook. I felt so amazing coloring with them - their smooth, rich color applying to every page. I filled every page of that book with colors until my pastels were just little nubs of color and my fingers were coated in a messy rainbow of awesomeness. 

Over the years my parents were great at encouraging me to be creative. They oohed and aahed at every painting of every flower I made in my Georgia O'Keefe stage. They read every piece of poetry I showed them and bought me hard backed composition books and sketch books and soft charcoal pencils and whatever else I felt I had to have to express myself. 

I spent my youth journaling and writing and drawing and painting and coloring. I filled pages and books and volumes with art, whether it be visual or written. I always thought I would grow up to be an real honest-to-goodness artist.

But somewhere along the way I lost all of that. I had kids and had to make money and had to be responsible and I just let it all go. I totally stopped creating.

And somewhere during this time of adulthood I got it into my head that I wasn't any good at art. That I couldn't draw or paint and I just compared myself to people I felt were actual artists and saw that I wasn't as talented.

And then a group of my Besties dragged me to one of those step-by-step painting classes where you bring in a barrel of wine and get tipsy while attempting to copy an instructor in a class of forty other people also getting tipsy. The entire class consist of my friend and I giggling and saying things like "What brush did she say to use?" "What color?" and most recently "My tree looks horrible."

And it was at that first class that I realized that no one else gets to define whether I'm an artist other than me. I realize I'm not up to date on every technique there is to know and I realize my tree only vaguely resembles an actual tree, but I don't care. Art isn't about becoming the next Makovsky - it's about expression.

With that, and as part of The Happiness Project, I started my very own Art Journal. 

And y'all. I'm loving it. It's just for me so I don't feel any pressure. It's not going on a wall somewhere, it's not being compared to anything else, it's just mine. And it's fun. And it's liberating. I love using different media and putting them together and just playing with paints and colors and shiny stuff. I am so happy with it.

I can do whatever I feel like doing with it. I can paint whatever colors, nothing has to look real, nothing has to mean anything, I can just play and smudge and tear and crumple. It is therapeutic for me in the best way possible and I hope I don't ever lose the art journal bug. I highly recommend it. 

PS - I have no idea what was on the 3rd floor of Halsey & Griffith. I never went up there. I can't even imagine what it might have been.