Two Mothers McGill: 12 weeks

or something. If you ask me, we're 13 weeks tomorrow, but if you ask those darned midwives, we're 12 weeks today.

My poor wife has developed some considerable exhaustion this week. She tells me it's akin to when you've got a really bad cold, and you're doped up on DayQuil and you're exactly in the middle of the dosing window and you KNOW that the medicine is functioning and holding the floodgates of cold symptoms back... but it's just not quite enough. You know that at any moment, all the miserableness could come on out and say howdy-do. I feel pretty awful for her, especially since she's been working more than full-time for the past few weeks. Maybe even longer than that. She tells me that her schedule isn't going to let up until March ends. Ugh. I wish I could be pregnant for her for just a little while, so she could not be sick and nauseated and emotional and exhausted at work - unfortunately, I don't know how to do that for her, so she's just going to have to suffer through it.

Valentine's Day she had to work pretty late, so after work I made myself a sandwich and grabbed our camera and headed out to Gates Pass. I had it in my head that I'd take photos of the sunset, but it took me too long to drive out there, so I ended up taking pictures of the night sky instead. I had such a good time, I asked Teri if she'd like to go with me again the following night and maybe we'd be able to catch that sunset. She was game, so she came to get me from work. We did get some pictures of the sunset, but we need to get there just a touch earlier for the best shots. However, we had a wonderful time together and got some really awesome photos, and it helped us to realize that we'd like to do a lot more sunset chasing, especially now that we have a nice DSLR camera. There are photos at the end of the post.

For Valentine's Day, I made a kind of mixed-media painting for T. I painted an 11 x 14 canvas with a blue sky and a few mountain peaks. Then I found an excerpt from an e.e. cummings poem (I fell in love with it!) and painted the quote on the canvas. Everywhere the words were, I daubed rubber cement over them. I also covered the entire bottom of the canvas, the mountains, to be precise. Once that all dried, I carefully used a blow-dryer to melt approximately twenty crayons down the front of the canvas. After I was satisfied with the melting job I'd done, I stuck the canvas in the freezer to cool the wax. The process after this was rather laborious, as the wax had avoided the rubber cemented areas as I'd hoped. So I had to scratch off all the wax from the areas that contained words from the quote. I ended up using a suggestion from my mother in law to put a paper towel down over the mountains and iron the area until I lifted up all the crayon wax. It mostly worked, so I didn't have to scratch all that off. Whew! After all the wax was removed from the words, I went back through and repainted anywhere the wax had stained my lettering. All in all, it was kind of an involved project, but I'm really amazed with how great it turned out. And I think T was quite pleased with it, as well! Photo below. She made me a lovely tooled wallet to replace the wallet she originally made me, I'm very excited to have a new one! My poor old wallet is falling apart. Thank you, darling! Photos of that to come.