making do

Just wanting to leave a little note here
for you to find should you come visiting. Life is flowing on with its gentle ups and downs, and I know well and truly now that any Small Meadow Press creating and offering will wait until the summer.

There is so much to fill my days, guiding my younger son through his last months of study at home, helping my elder son who is experiencing all the normal challenges of life in this complicated and confusing world, holding my mom's hand (literally and figuratively) as she makes her way through her much-smaller-but-just-as-confusing-world, tending friendships and our home and so much more...you know?

And more than ever I was needing a place to hold and keep all of my thoughts and plans and scraps and appointments. Last year I had made a mock-up of a planner with my calendar pages (made smaller) as the heart and many useful pages and dividers behind them. It was my intention to make a complete version for myself for 2011, with a vintage book cover on the outside and all of the pages I wanted to stay organized on the inside. And then to make some for sale (it has a name! and each section planned out! and I bought reams of paper for it two years ago, before life started making detours!) But several hours into wrangling with the margins the printer would allow for the smaller version (not the margins I would wish for, of course!) of just the first month in the year, I knew I didn't have the patience or the time to see that project through to the end....however nice that end would have been. 

So I gathered together some of my regular calendar pages left from all the trial-and-error that goes into printing, hole-punched them, added some pretty, blank pages, a cover from a misprint and a pocket at the back made from an old sign I used to use at show, bound them together with simple binding rings and-voila! I hole-punched the back page/pocket incorrectly the first time, the pocket scallops are not precise, the pocket itself is really too short, and the whole thing is too floppy...but...it is a helpful and pretty (if not perfect) planner to see me through until I can spend the time and find the persistence to bring my vision into reality. Maybe this summer. Maybe not.

I am learning not to press. And that is very different from the old days, when I would stay up until all hours to see a new creation through. But that doesn't work for me any more and I am learning to make do. Sleep is more important now than perfection. And having a place to slip my son's new prescription for contacts for safe-keeping there at the optometrist's office, or to immediately jot down the next appointment at the dentist's office has made me feel quite friendly towards my makeshift planner.

Friendly towards making do in general.