laratheescapeartist

I haven’t painted or written anything in a long time now because at the end of February our youngest daughter got very ill with some horrendous gastro bug and had to spend 3 nights in hospital on a drip, and then ten days after getting out of hospital for that she slipped in the playground and did something to her foot. According to the x-ray it wasn’t broken but it was bad enough that she refused to walk on it and so the emergency doctors decided to put her in a cast for a week to let it heal. All this meant she was off creche for weeks, and we didn’t know if we were going to have to cancel our first family trip back to the UK in nearly 2 years to wait for her foot to heal and/or because the P&O ferry we were booked on from Zeebrugge to Hull was probably not going to be running… In the end we did decide to go, with a toddler who even with the cast off still refused to walk and on a DFDS ferry from Amsterdam to Newcastle instead.

I’m glad we did, it was really nice to catch up with family and some old friends, and about five days into the holiday Isabel decided she could walk again which was such a relief. Also, thankfully, we managed to get away without catching or having to make any changes to our plans because of Covid. However, cousin James having chickenpox did thwart our original itinerary of staying with my brother and his family (one can never escape all plagues when children are involved).

We’ve now been back home for a few weeks and I don’t know what’s wrong with me (long covid without knowing I’ve had covid in the first place?), but I’ve been really struggling to find inspiration and motivation to draw anything else beyond this holiday cartoon. Instead I’ve been maniacally reorganizing the house after binge watching ‘The Home Edit’ on Netflix. Now our house is organized to within an inch of it’s life I really have no excuses not to get back to cartooning, so fingers crossed next week this fug of brain fatigue will lift and some flash of creativity will hit me!