Plans Derailed

From December 7-9, we were dealing with this:

Trevor was back to 100% on Tuesday the 10th and went to school.  On the evening of the 11th, Trevor's eyes both swelled shut and he could not see at all.  It was terrifying, both for him and for me.  We treated it as an allergic reaction, though it turned out to be a severe bacterial infection in both eyes.  By Thursday morning, with compresses applied, he was able to open his eyes enough to see a tiny sliver of the area by his feet.  In order to see straight ahead, he needed to point his face toward the ceiling.  Here he is at the doctor's office on Thursday the 12th with his eyes opened as wide as possible.

With antibiotics, compresses, and lots of rest, he was able to resume activities yesterday, thank goodness.  It is horrible when your child is sick, particularly when he couldn't do any of the typical sick-kid activities that require vision.  He couldn't see the TV, he couldn't read, he couldn't play games, he couldn't do anything on his own.  We had to miss multiple parties and other activities that we had been looking forward to attending.  I spent a lot of time reading out loud to him.  

Unfortunately, I got a bad cold (as well as a mild infection in one eye) right as Trevor was improving from his own cold and eye infections.  Obviously, we also didn't do any crafting while Trevor's vision was compromised or when I was under the weather.  All of the projects that have been running on my blog this past week were prescheduled.  The projects we'd planned to do didn't happen.  Now that we're both healthy, we're working furiously to finish our handmade Christmas gifts.  I'm going to share one of those tomorrow.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a project I finished awhile ago and finally delivered. Remember the Handprint Owl canvas I'd made back in February?  I showed it to my sister on the day her baby was born, with the promise to handprint her two kids and make her a canvas.  It ended up taking awhile to get the handprints done, due to a combination of me not seeing them all that often and my niece being extremely uncooperative about having her tiny, wiggly, clenched hand painted and pressed onto canvas.  Then it took a very long time for me to finally paint in the details to turn two handprints into two owls.  And then, it took another long time for me to see my sister somewhere that didn't involve travel and the nuisance of packing a canvas into luggage.

But now she finally has her canvas so I can finally share it.  Here are the handprints of then-12 year old Timothy and 1 month-old Allison.  In retrospect, I would have had Timothy put his hand closer to the center.  Because his hand was so far to one side, I couldn't put the tree trunk next to it.  But I'm happy with how it turned out and so is she.

  

I have another handprint art project in the works that involves my sister's family... more on that after Christmas!