Finding the artist within.

While cleaning out a room in my parent's house recently I found a bunch of blank canvases that my Mom had.  On one of them was a taped picture of this:

artist: Ron Burns

The picture had been painted for a Humane Society advertisement but the bright colors and cute face caught my eye.

I had recently gone to a place called Sips n Strokes with some friends and was completely inspired to recreate the experience at home after finding this picture.  After a few months of busy schedules I finally gathered some friends and we attempted to paint our animal friends.

I found a cat for Matthew and Jennifer and I attempted the dog.  We started with the backgrounds, had a break for dinner and went back to work on the rest.

We used techniques that we learned at our past visit to Sips n Strokes.

And before long we had some pretty neat looking paintings.

While the original was really cute, I couldn't help but add some of my own "Duncan details" to my painting.

And I we pleased to see my work appreciated.

It was fun!  We want to do it again!

Home Visit April 27th

Mom has started a weekly home visit schedule with the people taking care of her at Restore.  They want her to start getting used to doing activities at home with me so that when she comes back home she won't refuse to do things like she did before.  Hopefully this plan will work nicely so her transition home doesn't cost her any progress time.

This week she used her brand new shower for the first time, had lunch, planted some flowers, and then we looked at some picture albums.  Here is a picture of the flowers she helped with:

It was too cold outside to do this activity outside, but maybe next week she can at least go outside and water them.  

When we looked at the picture albums we went through a lot of old pictures.  She remembered A LOT of the people in the pictures, and thanks to Grandma Gert we cold confirm that she was remembering correctly.  It was neat.  She also remembered that Dad told her he was having the house painted (from the Sunday before - 3 days!) but couldn't remember that she took a shower in her new shower about an hour before.  Strange how she remembers some things easier than others.