painting Archives - Circles in the SandCircles in the Sand

Adirondack Park painting
“When I was your age, I was playing soldiers in the forest,” DH glumly told our sons. They were lying sprawled on the sofa, the glow of their screens casting an eerie shadow over their faces. “Come on – off you go! Time to get outside.”

“Shoo,” I added, for good measure.

The boys sat up and stretched their limbs as though limbering up for unaccustomed exercise. DH turned to me, with frustration plastered all over him. “Why don’t they want to play in the forest? … I don’t get it.”

I shrugged. “Lost the instinct maybe? More used to shopping malls.”

It did seem a massive travesty. There we were in upstate New York, in a lovely airbnb holiday home, surrounded by six million acres of wilderness. A wild and magical place, the Adirondack Park is full of pristine lakes, coniferous forest, tranquil rivers and towering mountains.

Paddling routes weave through the dense woodland and rapids swirl along the Ausable Chasm canyon to the east. Whiteface Mountain’s ski runs are nearby, a beautiful area that has hosted the Winter Olympics twice.

We were straight out of Dubai, where the ‘feels-like’ temperature had reached 64 degrees C; it was like finding paradise. On a massive scale. The largest publicly protected area in the US, the Adirondack Park is bigger than the Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier and Grand Canyon national parks combined.

All around us there was hiking, canoeing, fishing and white-water rafting – which we made the most of. But, still, when we were in the house, it seemed the boys would rather plug themselves into their devices than go outdoors.

“Right, that’s it,” said DH the next morning. “iPads are banned.” SCREEN.TIME.WAS.OVER.

Cut off from technology, the boys had to make their own entertainment, while I attempted to sneak in a book and some painting. As long as they didn’t start a bonfire, the kids were free to do wholesome things like building camps and hide-and-seek. It was all going well …

… Until …

Son1 got sick and ended up back on the sofa. This meant Son2 lost his playmate, leaving him in need of company (read: bored) and giving us (well me at least – I’d got really into the painting pictured above) another challenge.

“Mummy, will you come and play in the forest with me?”

“Can I just finish this?”

“NOOOOOOO!”

EDITED TO ADD: Pokemon Go might be the answer! I’m told it tricks them to get out and after about 30 minutes they actually start looking around and realise they are outside. Sad but …

With visitors on the way (at a slow pace, by boat via Singapore, Mumbai and pirate waters), I’ve been doing a few last-minute things, including painting the spare room.

I love decorating. Not the doing it part, but the concepts, the colours, the shopping and the putting-it-all-together parts.

I can spend hours watching programmes like Changing Rooms and secretly wish I could be an interior designer and get paid to shop in home decor stores and play around with fabrics, cushions, lighting and layouts, before blindfolding my clients for the big reveal.

I long ago had to give up on hiring painters to do the work for me as my schemes started getting too complicated to explain to non-English speaking decorators.

Like these clouds on the playroom ceiling:

I took over and did the blobby clouds. The airplanes are stickers

I bought special sponges and asked the painters to do ‘fluffy white clouds’. They looked at me like I was unhinged so I pointed out the window, gesturing at the heavens – to no avail because the bright-blue desert sky was, of course, devoid of clouds.

So now I do the painting myself – with help from Catherine the Great, who’s much more nimble up a ladder than I am. We’re a great team and tackle the 10ft-high walls with gusto (and a little knee-creaking on my part). But the trouble is I never quite know when to stop. As I finish a wall, other walls start to look anaemic and so I carry on, mixing and matching colours, quite possibly on a paint-fume-induced high.

It all gets a bit experimentalist too. The boys’ room features a beach at the bottom, blue waves in the middle and desert at the top. Our home also has a marble-effect wall, a multi-coloured chessboard wall and an aquarium wall to rival The Lost Chambers at the Atlantis hotel – all done as tastefully as possible.

I don’t stop when I run out of walls inside the house, either. Here’s the fairy-tale castle Catherine and I painted to liven up the boys’ sandpit outside. They were enchanted by it for all of five minutes.

I simply copied the castle from a design online and used exterior paints

DH (who won’t let me touch his study) occasionally rolls his eyes, but is mostly pleased with the results. If he starts to look nervous, I quote my mother-in-law, who once told us: “If you have a creative wife, you just have to say ‘Thank God!’ and let her get on with it.”

(My amazingly artistic m-i-l is actually my inspiration when it comes to interior design and – being such a petite lady – never ceases to amaze me with the way she lugs huge pieces of furniture around like an ant carrying 10 times its body weight).

As for my latest project, the spare room, allow me to do a big reveal right here. It’s more fig-grove than jungle (my original plan), but more grown-up than the Winnie-the-Pooh theme I replaced. So, blindfolds off……. Ta-daaaah: