Grown Up Plans

Monday's Challenge at art aMUSEment was to create a piece around "What did you want to be when you grew up?". 

Well now ... didn't that just set me back on my heels!   I couldn't remember ever wanting to be anything when I was growing up.  And then the worry immediately set in ... why didn't I have dreams of becoming something?  Was life so tenuous at that time that I never gave thought to it because I didn't think I'd live that long?   Well, of course the "duck and cover" drills in the 50's from the atomic bomb threats didn't instill any hopes in our fragile little souls ... but surely it couldn't have been that hopeless, could it?

So I called my sister (who's TWO years old than me *snicker*) ... did she have any memories of what I wanted to be?  No ... not that she could recall.   In fact, she couldn't recall any of us girls ever being asked the question!  Oh - of course!  That was before women were liberated ... way before ... so that explains it!!   We didn't get asked because it was a given -- we would become wives and mommies.   O.o   

Hmmm ... ok ... so when did I actually think of "becoming something else"?  It must have been when I was sophomore or junior year in high school and speaking with the school counselor about college preparatory courses.  Yes, that was it!  I had to have been 15 or 16 then as I started college at 17.   I'd had my first psych courses in 9th grand and I was determined to major in Child Psychology with a double major in Spanish so that I could work with multicultural children.

Grand ambitions I had then.  Ambitions that quickly went by the way side when my first baby arrived ... and I never ever regretted a moments loss for that other ambition ... I was quite happy to be a Mommy!  :-)

So this page is dedicated to the grand-wannabe who never was ... and I thank God for every single one of my three children who've given me five grandchildren so far!

Grown Up Plans

The background is acrylic stamping (remember that large sheet of shapes I made with foamies and showed you in an earlier blog piece? yeah - that stamp!), then layers of my home-made alcohol inks, followed by stenciling with white acrylic to help tone down and blend all the background colours. The children dancing was a B&W image from Free Digital Stamp Images blog which I printed on cardstock and coloured with Spectrum Noir markers. I used a decorative punch on the children's paper corners and then used washii tape at top and bottom. The children's background was done in watercolour pencil as well as watercolours. The vine was done in markers and the buttons are all from Buttons Galore and a bit of added bling with the gems. The yellow butterfly is a store-die-cut embellishment and the smaller one was another free vintage digital image from Free Digital Stamp Images. The tag was vanilla and Spectrum Noir coloured to coordinate and held in place with a pink and white polka-dotted brad.