Back To The Drawing Board

I know I haven't been drawing at all lately. But the other day Celina got into my portfolio and then one of my old sketchbooks. She found the plans for one of my high school art projects - a temple with an East Asian-inspired goddess standing inside. The whole assignment was supposed to be made out of cardboard, with a sculpture of some sort included somewhere on the project. Anyways, hearing me describe it, she decided to make one of her own. We got an old cardboard box, and then we started doing some sketching. She wanted something more Egyptian-themed (of course!), so we looked at books, patterns, paper dolls, and online for inspiration. I would copy down some things she liked, she would draw a figure of what she wanted, and we went back and forth drawing until we came to something she really liked. Her "statue" (it will be made out of paper since we don't have any clay handy in the house) is her own version of the goddess Hathor. She made me draw the final copy ou...

Today we finally had a taste of something we grew ourselves. Our very first cucumber. The girls were SOOO excited when they saw it on the vine and insisted I pick it at once. They almost couldn't contain themselves as I washed it and cut it. Miri wanted to eat it whole. But as soon as I cut the stem off and they realized what it was (a cucumber!) they wanted no part of it. Oh well. It tasted awful nice in my sandwich anyways. There are at least 4 more hiding under the vines, so I guess we'll be eating a lot of them for a while. I'm still in awe that we managed to grow anything this year. I'm winning my battle with the vile squash bugs and things are finally starting to recover after the tornadoes. Everything is taking a really long time to take off - tomatoes, zucchini, leeks, bell peppers... we've only been able to eat all the herbs so far. The day after we planted everything, the yard looked like this: That sad little box on the left is the garden, full of wate...