Living my best life this morning

I’ve had a lot of midlife sleep troubles lately, along with a ton of other women, and it’s made it hard to bound out of bed ready to work (at least, after tea) the way I am used to doing. I’ve been working hard to get more sleep — limiting evening screen time, drinking milk with dinner instead of wine, stopping caffeine after 10am, etc. January usually helps anyway, which is a blessed relief after show and holiday stress and generally bad sleep for a while. I’ve gotten myself on track the last couple of weeks, and it’s felt good. This morning I’m having a great day, and I want to write about it and remind myself to at least shoot for this more often.

Instead of lying in bed too long looking at instagram (I do love to scroll through artists I follow and get ideas for new things to try), I got up quite early. It was still firmly dark, so my kitchen, which is very cheerful in the sunlight, was more dreary. I decided to have breakfast instead by the gas log fire, which was a cosy, warm, and happy way to start the morning. You can just see Mr. Darcy next to my chair in the semi dark.

The dawn was gorgeous as I went out to get my paper, and my iPhone couldn’t capture the colors. I decided to do a quick sketch to start the morning. I’ve been concentrating on prints lately and not sketching much, so this was a very happy way to start the day. I’m going to try to remember to build more sketching in, even when I’m doing good work already. And I was still at my table and working on my print at 7:15 to enjoy the morning light. I got the last tweaks (I think) done on my current print, proofed it, and submitted it to a place where I’m dreaming of having a show. A very good morning indeed. Now off to some different work.