Birthday Girl Card

We had another special occasion in my family this week.

My daughter’s birthday was this week. She’s a sweet sixteen! I made this card in honor of it.

Oh, who am I kidding? I make them for everybody in my family…because it’s fun! 😜

This is the sketch I was working on for her card. You can see how I thought a little better of the ‘i’ in the second version. But, I was going for something I would think would look good for a kid’s card. My daughter is 16…but, developmentally, she’s a lot younger and this works.

I just wish I could say her day treated her better this year…In fact, this card is a day late. She had a seizure the day of.

If you’ve been following along, my daughter started experiencing seizures during the pandemic. She started having them more frequently and multiple seizures in a day toward the earlier part of this year. It has been a lot of sleepless, prayerful nights and a fairly long battle to get her to where she is now. Currently, her behaviors are returning to manageable, if not normal, and we are seeing fewer seizures. Love this trend. But until we can get to no seizures, we may still be in testing mode. We’ll see.

She made it through the day without another seizure, thankfully, and wound up enjoying the rest of it. But, truly, if the enemy comes for nothing but to steal kill and destroy, you know seizures are nothing but the devil! I hate them. And, I almost gave up on finishing the card because, her birthday was over anyway.

But, at the end of the day, I love my kid. And why should seizures get to win? I decided to finish the card anyway. 🤷🏾‍♀️

I traced this design in Procreate and made the rest of the card there using various brushes from Molly Suber Thorpe’s Lettering and Calligraphy Procreate Toolkit and Ian Barnard’s Freestyler Brushes for Procreate . Then, I printed it straight from the app.

I made two versions because I love magic papers! But in the end, I just printed the pink one. Less ink.

You can see the process video below.

I’m going to end with the fact that many things in life suck. Indeed they suck the life out of us. But, maybe we give them more control than we need to, sometimes. And, this is my takeaway from the lessons seizure activity is re-teaching me…Let’s do what needs to be done to manage sucky things…and then choose happy anyway. 💪🏾

Y’all be good out there.