So perhaps you’ll find this funny, perhaps a bit sad. Truth is that hindsight is always 20/20, yet this is a situation wherein there was foresight – which was ignored and the resulting adventure unfolded as expected and left me with no one to blame but myself. It’s no stretch of the imagination to understand how a mother of a feisty seven month old was compelled at any cost to get a bit of work done in the studio. For a while now it’s been a struggle for me to get more than a brief moment here and there to get much accomplished. My boy can magically sleep for hours when others are watching him, but for me mere minutes sometimes is all I get. So one of my solutions to getting more work done was to start slip-casting functional forms again so that I didn’t have to worry about leaving a half finished pot on the wheel to rush to the bedside of a wailing infant. I figured I could cast some forms everyday, stock pile them, and when I had a bit more time I’d do the decorating. Seemed to make sense right? One would think so, until today when I decided that it was a good idea to try to make plaster molds of the solid forms I’d made the other day for making the drop molds. Even as I began I knew I was being silly, the babe could wake at any moment. But I continued, and there I stood with my splash coat setting and the rest of the plaster slowing, painfully slowly, starting to set. In the silence of the studio I could hear the hum of the baby monitor, quiet breathing, all good. But sounds from outside, a dog barking a few yards over, the afternoon train clanking down the rails all threatened to shatter that silence. Each noise made my heart race as I sat waiting and desperately mentally trying to will my plaster to set faster. Sure as anything the silence was broken, the babe awoke and not to a playful chatter but a full fledged scream. No time to debate what sort of a parent I was – one that was okay to let them cry? Who was I kidding, I never had the stomach or heart for that, so before I knew it I was flying up the stairs, ripping off my plaster soaked gloves and rescuing the boy from the horrors of whatever had woken him. But back in the studio there was a bucket with enough plaster for four drop mold setting…leaving it would mean starting from scratch again, heaven knows when, plus having to chuck the whole bucket, rendered solid as a block into the bin. So I grabbed a towel I passed in the hallway on my way out and ran back to the studio, placed the baby on the towel on the dirty cement floor, holding him with one hand – as he’s not quite sturdy enough yet to warrant risking him in his semi-sleepy state tipping over onto the hard ground. So if you can imagine the sight, one hand on the babe, leaning over and desperately trying to salvage the rest of the hardening plaster to finish the four molds in time. Miraculously they’re done, not shocking at all though is the fact that they are likely the worst molds I’ve EVER made, even considering the shockers I made when an undergrad student and just learning. But I will proudly use them, defiantly in fact. Defiant towards the thought that keeps creeping into my mind that maybe I can’t do it all and that I might have to give up ceramics for a time…no. I won’t quit. It will mean sacrifices, as it already has, it also means that somedays my creative drive is fueled by other things, like sewing (way less messy) and singing horrible made up songs about nothing which brings out the best smiles to my little princes’ face. I realize though that I can do it all, just not all at once, and maybe not when he’s sleeping, at least not the messy stuff.