one of the best ways i can think of to deepen your family culture is to make art together.  last year we all participated in Daisy Yellow’s Index Card a Day Challenge: get a stack of 3×5 cards and draw/paint/collage/??? on one every day for the months of June and July.  it was great fun and a fine excuse to make sure we made room and time for creating every day.  though the goal is simply to create and not worry much about the end project, you can read more about what we did with our favorite cards in this post about memory work from earlier this month.  as for my goal of writing 300 posts before i turn 40 in July…this will be post #267!

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{three of my cards, one by Mabel, one by Andy}

i was lying in bed looking at the internets.  my brother, Dave, helped us set up wi-fi in the house, and Andy had brought home a Nook for the Memorial Day weekend.  so it was late, i should have been asleep, the baby would be up to nurse in just a little while.

then i found Tammy at Daisy Yellow.  i liked the look of her work, i liked her tone and can-do! attitude, i liked her tutorials.  they seemed like something i might show the children.  then i clicked on the Index Card a Day button: make art. on an index card. every day during June and July.  that was only a few days away.  we had had fun the last few weeks working with prompts from Barb at Sketch Tuesday, and i had loads of index cards.  the peeps sounded interested, so we started drawing.

i knew i would have to have some help coming up with ideas…i had been listening to On Beingagain, and had noticed hand-drawn sketch notes on some of the show topics.  they were done by Doug Neill.  so i started poking around his site and using some of his ideas as i worked on my cards.  i was having fun.  you can blow through a stack of cards as you listen and draw!

then a few weeks ago Doug launched a new project called Revolutionary Learning. it’s about learning by doing and sharing your work as you learn, putting stuff out in the world before it’s perfected.

so here it is.  tomorrow i turn 39.  in a year and a day i will be 40.  i want to live this year for all it’s worth.  it’s been a mighty decade, and i want to send it out with a bang.  a lot of my time is already spoken for: i have three children, we homeschool.  i’m not going to be spending the year living in a hut with a mud floor and thatched roof.  but i live with my eyes (and hopefully heart) open.  i have three children, we homeschool.  i want to get this year down.

so.  300 posts between now and 40.  as our Peace Corps director said during our training, go big or go home!