We’ve been writing a lot of thank-you notes lately around here. I’ve always been a big believer in thank-you notes, especially for gifts that were mailed to me. If nothing else they let the giver know that the gift was received. I like handwritten notes best, but I think emailed thank-yous are just as thoughtful and polite.

In previous years, I would just have Annalie dictate her thank-you notes to me, and she would sign her name and maybe draw a little picture. This year, it was a whole different ballgame. Annalie is reading and writing more and more on her own. That means that now, thank-you notes are a chance for her to practice handwriting, spelling, sentence structure, and letter-writing.

I’ve often remarked on how much Annalie is like my younger brother. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a stronger resemblance between Annalie and her Unky Ben than in their similar approach to thank-you notes, which can be summed up succinctly in three words: DO NOT WANT.

When I was a kid, I loved writing thank-you notes. I still do, though I might occasionally lack the time-management to get them done in a timely manner. My brother, on the other hand, fought writing thank-you notes tooth and nail. He just didn’t like to write, or sit still. I loved doing both.

It’s all in the approach, though. If you’d taken my brother to the house of each person who’d given him a present, I’m sure he would have gladly run to the door, rung the doorbell, and effusively thanked each friend or relative in person, complete with hugs and kisses and detailed descriptions of how he planned to play with each new toy. If you’d tried to make me go door-to-door and thank everyone in person, I probably would have slouched down under my seatbelt, crossed my arms, scowled, and refused to get out of the car. Have I mentioned that my brother and I are very different in some ways?

Here’s the thing about Annalie: when it’s her idea, she loves to write and draw and make lists. She does it almost compulsively on her own, while she’s watching TV, while someone is reading to her, while we’re driving, while she’s waiting for her food in a restaurant. If I try to make her write when she doesn’t want to, it often turns into a long, drawn-out battle of wills (see the updates at the end of that post) that just exhausts us both and makes me question my fitness for motherhood.

Mostly, writing thank-you notes this time around has been a pleasant surprise. I’ve been trying to catch her in the mood to write, which has helped a lot. And I guess she is six years old, after all! It’s amazing what a difference a year can make.

When we started I wrote out a sample note for her that said, “Dear ________, Thank you for the ________. Love, Annalie.” That way she could see she didn’t have to write very much, and that at least half of the words she had to write were words she already knew.

At first she groaned and complained a bit. We talked several times about how kind it was of her friends and relatives to take the time to think about her, pick a present she would like, wrap it prettily and send it to her; and about how taking five minutes to write a thank-you note was a small gesture of gratitude in return for that thoughtfulness. I made the mistake of joking to her once that I could tell everyone she didn’t want gifts next year because thank-you notes were too much trouble to write, and she got genuinely upset. Oops. Reminder to self: six-year-olds might be more mature than five-year-olds, but they don’t always get sarcastic humor.

After she got a few notes done, the complaints were fewer and farther between. Yesterday, writing what was probably her 12th or 13th thank-you note in recent weeks, she pretty much wrote the whole thing on her own. She only needed help with one or two words that she didn’t know!

I told her I was proud of her, and pointed out that she seemed to have learned how to spell “dear” and “thank.” She replied in a rather annoyed tone, “No, I was just guessing! I don’t know how to spell them!” She reacts the same way when we point out a word she read on her own, telling us she didn’t really know what it said, that she just saw the letters and guessed. It’s no use telling her that that is reading. She’s so funny.

But hey, she’s writing thank-you notes, and learning while she’s doing it. Even if she isn’t ready to admit it.

(Thanks, Mom, for taking both the photos in this post!)

Annalie’s 6th birthday party ended up being a bit of a flashback. Her 3rd birthday happened to fall on a 10%-off-day at our local pottery-painting place, so I let a few friends know that we were planning to go paint that morning and then have lunch at a nearby Mexican place.

Photo taken May 9, 2007

As it turned out, a few of our friends decided to join us, so the whole thing ended up feeling like a party. It was much more fun for me than her actual 3rd-birthday party, because I was sick that day. I powered through the playgroup party and then crashed hard when everyone went home. I don’t even remember it very well, honestly. But I have good memories of the painting day.

We debated several options for Annalie’s birthday party this year. But since we’d just moved, the only friends we wanted to invite were our old friends from when we lived in Maryland. That means all the guests live an hour and a half away from us, and it would have been hard on them to make a 3-hour round-trip drive for a birthday party. So we decided to meet halfway…for pottery-painting and Mexican food.

Most of the kids in this group are experienced pottery-painters, so they quickly chose their pieces and settled down to paint. Annalie finished so quickly that she was bored and begging to open her presents. I wanted her to hold off just a few more minutes, till most of the kids were done painting, so I handed her my camera and told her to take pictures.

I especially like the last two. They’re self-portraits she took with the timer.

Finally, it was time to open presents!

Annalie even had a present from Gabby and Annie to open, despite the fact that they live in Indiana and weren’t at the party. They gave her a cupcake-making kit, proving that they know both Annalie and me well. We have the best friends!

At the Mexican restaurant down the road, we all ate our fill of chips and salsa and cheese dip and whatever else we ordered, and then it was cupcake time! And history repeated itself just a little bit.

Originally we were going to have butterfly cupcakes, but Annalie decided at the last minute that she wanted daisy cupcakes instead. She even came up with the frosting design on her own, and it was much cuter than my idea. The ‘Feliz Cumpleaños’ plates were on clearance at Target for 58 cents, and Annalie thought it was cool to have birthday plates with Spanish on them. Works for me!

Old friends, painting, and good food were a great way to celebrate Annalie’s birthday. Thanks, everyone!

If you follow me on facebook you might already know that I got a haircut yesterday. I’d been thinking about chopping it off for a while and now I’m wondering what took me so long. I feel like I lost three pounds of hair and I love waking up with hair that looks like it’s partying. I’m already looking forward to a summer of not needing to blow-dry my hair. Ahhh.

Annalie got a haircut too. She’s decided she wants to grow her hair longer so she just got the ends trimmed, but she asked for her bangs to be cut short. She hates it when her hair gets in her face, and I think she secretly loved it last summer when she had to have her bangs cut to about a half-inch after she and Bug played hair salon.

Annalie’s started getting birthday packages in the mail, since her birthday is coming up. She got a really fun package from Grandma Carol and Grandpa Tom with a red-white-and-blue dress, fancy barrettes, cupcake-making supplies, and a marigold garden kit. And Zach, Josh & Alex definitely knew what Annalie would love, and sent her a convertible sports car and a ballerina outfit for her Zhu Zhu pets, along with some adorable hand-drawn cards.

We saw a fuzzy caterpillar on the deck the other day.

We’ve been spending more time on the deck recently because we bought a new pool for Annalie. It’s really too big for the deck—if we filled it full with water it would be very heavy and we don’t want to test our second-story deck that way—but for now we can just fill it half-full and let Annalie play. Later in the summer we’ll move it down to the grass. If you ask me the weather isn’t really warm enough for swimming, but Annalie loves water and will happily splash around in water that seems way too cold to me.

My good friend Angela had a baby girl recently. I crocheted the big blanket for baby Kate Marie, and the two smaller ones for big sisters Gabby & Annie to use as doll blankets.

So…that’s what we’ve been up to lately. I plan on blogging every day but somehow every day ends with me sitting on the couch staring at my laptop blankly, too tired to bother. I need to finish flickring my Omaha photos and then blog about the rest of my trip, and I promised several of you my recipe for spinach pasta salad. Annalie’s 6th birthday is Sunday, and her party is tomorrow, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty of photos to share and stories to tell about that. Blogger’s paradox! I don’t think I ever really get away from it.

Just because this post is already so random, here are some more random photos that I like and just downloaded. Rain on my car window one day a few weeks ago:

The shadow of our minivan yesterday evening, looking like Shrek’s head:

A weird shot I took of me and Annalie at the park as she was climbing on a chain thing:

Finally, I took this picture of the changing table at a McDonald’s a while back. Someone’s either a grammar freak or pop-culturally ignorant. Either way, it made me laugh:

This post is a lot like my life lately: busy, random, with me feeling rather distracted and perpetually behind on my to-do list, yet fairly happy with it all. How are you guys doing?