I see the shadow of a crow out of the corner of my eye and hear a Blue Jay squawk. It’s still quiet in my house, I’m glad it’s Saturday morning.  A moth crawls up and down the window, should I take him outside, or let him reach the same fate as the moth I found on the kitchen window sill? The beautiful iridescent, brown, velvety, creature. “Look Jack and Fiona, what I found!” I say. I show them the delicate specimen, pull open his wing to reveal a beautiful orange and yellow surprise. The following day when we go to examine the moth again deterioration had already begun. His whiskers have fallen off and I can no longer pull open his wing. Back to the earth the moth will go.

My quiet morning has just concluded. “Mama” Jack calls. I yell back, “Yeah, do you want pumpkin pancakes?” He says “Yes”. I thought I would have more time to write. They didn’t go to bed until 10:30 last night. I lay in their room too tired to do anything else while they play and laugh and jump on top of me. I think it was those chocolate candies we ate, it wound them up.  I was tired though. I’ve been working hard on my canvas paintings. My “Notebook project” is there too, which I work on every time I am in my studio. I am grappling with the difference between working in my notebooks and on the canvas. I had a thought this morning, the notebooks are informal, the large canvas feels formal. It also feels plastic, the gessoed canvas compared to paper.  There’s also a huge size difference. But I’m making headway. My books feel more sculptural, more immediate, I am trying to think of the canvas in that way. Not just a 2d image, surface orientated, but the whole thing. Also the notebooks are a series, many pages of experiments and images that relate to each other, I am trying to work on my canvases as more of a group. Although this is quite challenging due to space issues, but if I could just lay out several like I do my notebooks I think I’d have better luck. Right now I am forced to be very close at all times to the canvas.

Time to go now and make Pumpkin pancakes!