After a week of rain and being cooped up in the house, we celebrated yesterday’s sunshine by going on a two-hour photowalk. We set out from our gate, cameras at the ready. In the back of my mind I was thinking that this would probably be the last photowalk we’d take in this town.

Brace yourself. There are a lot of photos in this post.

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

Annalie was stopping every three feet to take pictures of the grass, of a flower, of a “pretty white car.” She loves taking pictures, this kid. To combat my urge to hurry her along, I tried to find an interesting picture to take each time she stopped, right where we were standing.

It was fun to challenge myself, and it led to a few cool shots that I probably would never have taken otherwise—looking up at power lines, of the scrollwork on the gate of an apartment complex, a hummingbird in flight.

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

We walked much farther than on our last photowalk. Then, it was almost bedtime and we just took a quick walk around the block. Yesterday when we set out it was early afternoon and we had all the time in the world, so we walked all the way downtown.

Now when I say “downtown” I am not talking about downtown San Diego. I’m talking about our little town center, which is basically one long main road lined with restaurants, antique stores, coffee shops, and other small businesses. It’s not terribly exciting but it’s homey and friendly and there are always people walking around. There’s a small farmer’s market there every Friday afternoon, and an antique car show every Thursday evening. Our downtown is one of the reasons we’re going to miss living here when we move.

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

This jewelry display outside a secondhand-clothing store caught Annalie’s eye, especially the sparkly star rings.

I aimed my camera at her as she took another photo. It’s kind of fun taking her picture when she’s distracted and I’m not trying to get her to pose.

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

We stopped at a coffee shop that Brenda has been urging me to try for a while now. Kinda sad that she’s been there several times while housesitting for us, and I’d never been there till yesterday.

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

It’s a very cool shop. Each table is colorfully painted with a different design bearing the shop’s name; long, narrow paintings of girls who look like they live in hip graphic novels line the walls; a giant lazy Susan full of jars of loose-leaf tea sits on a high shelf next to the cash register; and at least one employee has an English accent.

We took our latte and hot cocoa to a table outside, so we could watch the dogs that were tied to the fence around the small seating area. Annalie thought it was really cool that there was a double dish outside with a water bowl in one half and dog treats in the other. While we were sitting there, Annalie suddenly started pretending she was a robot, complete with beeping and booping noises. I asked her if that meant she was bored and ready to walk, and she said, “Yes. It. Does. Ready. To. Walk.”

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

Then she pointed across the street and asked in her normal voice, “Can we cross over there so we can look at the beautiful gowns?” I love the photo she took, especially how you can see the sky and clouds reflected in the window.

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

We varied our route on the way home, so we could pass by some different sights. Annalie said that this church (which is more than 100 years old, by the way) looked like a palace. She said she especially loved the “beautiful golden windows.” I swear, she really does talk like that.

I have no idea why “Food is good” is painted on the window of this community-association thrift shop. It’s been there for ages, and it makes me laugh every time I see it. Yesterday I asked Annalie if she could read it for me, and she sounded it out without any trouble at all.

Homeschooling aside: I feel like she should know all those words on sight without having to sound them out, because I know she’s read them many times before. She is able to read a lot of words now, but she still thinks she has to sound them out every time, except for a small list that she knows immediately (Annalie, mom, dad, cat, dog, love, book, stop, go, yes, no, exit, red, blue, yellow, green, pink). I keep telling her that she can remember what a word looks like and then she won’t have to sound it out the next time, but for some reason that doesn’t seem to be clicking in her head yet.

However, if I spell words out loud for her, she can usually figure them out much more quickly than by looking at them, which is totally foreign to me. I have always been such a visual learner that it’s challenging for me to remember that Annalie doesn’t learn best the same way I do.

Anyway. I’m not worried about her reading skills. They’re on track for her age, if not a little ahead of where she “should” be in kindergarten. And her verbal skills are definitely above average. I know she’ll read soon enough. Really at this point I feel like homeschooling is more about educating me than it is about educating her. She’s just having fun figuring the world out and I’m along for the ride.

I’ve always rather liked this building. It’s been abandoned for a while now, which makes me kinda sad.

I didn’t stay sad for long, though, because we came to the house with the animal statues in the yard. There’s a big metal rhinoceros on the corner, and a tortoise is tucked up under some bushes on the other side.

After I took the picture of Annalie with the rhino, we spotted a black-and-white cat on the sidewalk. She came right up to us when I said, “Hi, pretty kitty!” and rubbed against our legs and let us pet her for a few minutes. Then she trotted up some nearby stairs and disappeared.

We walked on, moving a bit more quickly since the sun was getting lower in the sky, the air was getting cooler, and neither of us had jackets. We were glad we had our hot drinks to warm us up.

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

Photo by Annalie, age 5y8m

We took more photos: a sunlit gumball on a sweetgum tree; my coffee cup sitting on a wall as I stopped to tie my shoe; stones in the sidewalk where a corner had been smoothed down; street signs on a curve in the road. Then we discovered that one of our neighbors is an urban chicken farmer.

Well, urban poultry farmer would probably be a more accurate description, since we saw at least one duck and several other birds running around the yard, and a few more in a large, airy aviary on the side of the house.

When Annalie saw the duck, she laughed and exclaimed, “That duck is having a bad hair day!” His odd feather tufts brought to mind a strange Elizabethan wig. Maybe he was just in costume for a play.

While Annalie stood on a low wall and admired the fowl, I looked up and noticed we were standing beneath some really tall palms. There are a lot of tall old palm trees like this in my town. They’ve probably been there for at least 50 years, possibly closer to 100.

Once the chicken and the duck lost interest in us, we moved on and crossed the street to check out the sidewalk stairs. I’ve always kind of loved them. They’re on the corner right by the first house we lived in here, and I used to walk on them all the time. We don’t live close enough to them now that I ever walk on them, but I figured they would make a good spot for our daily photo for Troy.

First I had to wait for Annalie to take these photos. I actually asked her, “Why do you want to take photos of a van?” and she just shrugged. But once we got home and downloaded the photos, I saw that she was apparently taking a picture of the clouds and light and trees as reflected in the van’s windows. She never fails to surprise me, this kid of mine.

Um…yeah, that photo probably won’t work for Troy.

Ah, that’s better. I picked this spot for our photo, wondering if Troy would recognize it. Of course, if he’s reading my blog post now he knows where we took it. Oh well.

Annalie’s camera started flashing a low-battery warning at this point, so I told her if she wanted me to take a photo of something to just ask. That was a mistake, because she started pointing things out for me to take photos of every third step. So I distracted her by asking her to read signs as we passed by. She was quite proud of herself for figuring out the word “elementary” on a school’s sign, as well as the name of our street, and that “Av” stands for “Avenue.”

Then she distracted me from the reading lessons by pointing out a clump of blooming rosemary, which was really quite lovely. I wish our landlord’s gardeners weren’t so consistent in cutting back the rosemary growing in our front yard. I’d have loved for it to bloom. Maybe I’ll have some blooming rosemary wherever we live next. And wherever we live, I look forward to more photowalks with my girl. They’re crazy fun.

For some reason, my blog comments haven’t been getting emailed to me as usual, so forgive me if I’m slow in responding to a question in your comment. I’m trying to figure out how to get the comments emailed to me again and am having no luck, since none of my settings are any different than they used to be. Anyone out there know how to fix this on a WordPress blog?

After our morning’s adventure at Sunny Jim Cave and La Jolla Cove, we still had a few hours to kill before they would turn the water back on at our house. So we headed to Balboa Park.

Balboa Park is one of my favorite places in the world. It’s a beautiful park, right in the middle of the city. Our world-famous zoo is there, along with a bunch of museums, gardens, and performing arts centers. It’s a really fun place to explore, and easy to spend a day there.

Tuesdays are especially cool at Balboa Park, because some of the museums are free to county residents and military. There’s a rotating schedule—different ones are free each week—so before we left the house we checked to see which ones were free that week. We almost decided on the Museum of Man, an anthropology museum which is one of my favorites, but since Brenda doesn’t live in the county she couldn’t get in free, and the admission to that one is steepish. We decided the Mingei International Museum would do very nicely instead. It’s a museum of art from cultures all over the world and looked really interesting.

Plus the Nikigator is outside the Mingei. Whee, art that kids are encouraged to climb all over! Even the moms got in on the fun.

That’s a tiny little me, reflected in each one of those shiny marbles. Too bad I’ll be in Omaha during all of the next 7 Days run.

Inside the Mingei (which is well worth the price of admission) the best thing we saw saw this project called Fisch Out of Water. It was a display of wire jellyfish, hung from the ceiling. I especially got a kick out of the fact that some of the jellyfish were crocheted.

There were tons of cool, interesting, unique pieces of art in this little museum. Unfortunately, most of it is tempting to small children’s hands. It didn’t help that some of the art looked a heck of a lot like benches and tables. There were security guards hovering everywhere, reminding us anxiously not to touch the art. It’s not like Brenda and I were ignoring our kids, either, we were right on top of them reminding them to keep their hands behind their backs so they wouldn’t forget and touch anything.

Brenda and Bug and I could have stayed much longer than we did, drifting from room to room and leisurely examining our favorite pieces. Annalie was champing at the bit to get back outside, though. And we didn’t want to end up on the wrong end of town at rush hour.

On the way back to the car we stopped by the organ pavilion, thinking the kids might like to run across the stage. Annalie decided she needed to climb over each and every row of benches on her way to the stage. Okay then.

Bug made a beeline for the stage and sat on the edge, dangling her feet while she watched Annalie climb the benches. Once Annalie got there, the real fun began.

Annalie and Bug danced and ran and chased each other around that stage for a good twenty minutes or more. Brenda and I sat in the front row and enjoyed a break. We stayed until we noticed that the girls had apparently worn themselves out and were having a quiet chat on the stage, then herded the girls toward the parking lot, making vague plans to go back one Sunday for the free organ concert. Not only did we make it home before traffic got too gnarly, but when we got there the water was back on two hours ahead of schedule.

Go see the cave we’d been meaning to see for years? Check. Climb all over festively-tiled giant alligator statue? Check. Crocheted wire jellyfish? Check. Let kids burn off excess energy before going home? Check. Expose children to local geography, wildlife, and culture? Check, check and check. Tourist Tuesday? Win!

Last Saturday was Smithsonian Magazine’s Museum Day 2009. A bunch of different museums throughout the country were offering free admission to anyone who brought in a printed form from the Smithsonian Magazine website. I wasn’t really planning to go to any of the free museums, because I’m allergic to crowds and figured that it would be a busy day. But somehow I found myself on the website perusing the list of museums and one jumped out at me: the Whaley House Museum.

I’ve been walking by the Whaley House, a 19th-century home and general store that’s been turned into a museum, for years but had never gone inside. There are so many free things to do in Old Town that the $10 admission never seemed worth it. I figured I should take advantage of the free admission if I ever wanted to see the inside of the place.

I bribed Annalie with the promise of running around the park and maybe a piece or two of saltwater taffy, and off we went to Whaley House. We handed our get-in-free pass to the docent who greeted us at the door, and in return we got laminated cards printed with information about the history of the house and the Whaley family, and a cheery, “Feel free to take lots of photos!”

We wandered around downstairs first, peering into the gated front parlor. I pointed out an embroidery hoop sitting on a sofa and a basket of crocheting by a rocking chair to Annalie, and we talked about how women used to do lots of needlework and sewing and knitting, in the days before TV. “Like in the books we’ve been reading, how Laura and Mary make clothes for their dolls and Ma knits in the evening while Pa plays his fiddle,” I said, suddenly realizing that the Little House books were set in almost exactly the same era that the museum memorializes.

Upstairs we saw a child’s bedroom, with a puzzle spread on the floor that was a map of the United States, just like one Annalie has. There was an alcove at the end of the upstairs hall with a window wide open to catch the breeze, and three chairs arranged around it. It was such a pleasant spot that Annalie and I sat in the chairs and looked out the window for a minute. We took our our Day 58 photo for Troy there.

We could actually go into the upstairs front bedroom that the Whaley family leased to the Tanner Troupe to use as a theater for various plays. We sat on the benches and looked at the stage (a recently-restored replica of the original) and imagined what it must have been like to have theater-goers trooping in and out of the house, and theatricals going on down the hall from your bedroom.

Although I suppose that’s not any stranger than the courtroom that was housed on the ground floor for a couple of years, in what was originally supposed to be a granary. The County of San Diego leased the one-story room from the Whaleys.

And of course, the General Store was on the ground floor of the main house as well. That was actually the primary purpose of the building, to house Whaley’s store. Annalie looked around with interest at the various items displayed, spending several minutes paging through a binder filled with old photos. I made the Little House connection again, telling Annalie that when Laura and Mary went to town with Ma and Pa, the store they went to was a lot like the one we were standing in. She thought that was pretty neat.

Blue willow ware, just like the set that originally belonged to my great-grandparents. Annalie spotted this and immediately said, “Hey, those are just like Aunt Julie’s dishes!” I have a blue willow tea set packed away somewhere, too. It belonged to my mom and Aunt Julie when they were kids. Once Annalie’s a little older we’ll get it out and have tea parties.

And that was it for our tour of the Whaley House. Annalie was done and ready to leave in less than 15 minutes. Granted, it’s a small house. Still, I was very glad we’d gone on a day when we could get in for free. I did talk Annalie into stopping at the museum gift shop for a quick look around, and I’m glad I did. They sell some cool stuff there! I’ll be going back there to buy a few Christmas presents.

We headed over to the section of Old Town that’s a State Historical Park to wander around for a bit. We walked through the Estudillo House, as we usually do, and admired the grapes on the arbor over the old well. It was all I could do not to reach out and pick a few, they looked so good!

I found myself explaining condensation to Annalie at one point. I don’t know exactly how we got there, but there we were. When I finished my as-simple-as-I-could-make-it explanation, I said to Annalie, “You probably won’t really remember this, but that’s okay. Someday when you’re older you’ll be learning about condensation and you’ll think, ‘Hey, I remember walking through Old Town with my mom when I was five years old and her telling me about condensation. How weird.’” I know this for a fact, because I can remember sitting in the backseat of our 1975 Dodge Colt when I was about Annalie’s age, eating an apple and asking my dad why apples turn brown. He gave me a long explanation about oxidation that involved cars rusting. I definitely didn’t take it all in that day, but I learned the word “oxidation” and I still remember that conversation.

Maybe that’s really why I’m homeschooling Annalie this year. Maybe it’s because I selfishly want her to learn as much from me as I can teach her, before she learns it from other sources. I don’t feel like I’m doing all that great with the homeschooling so far. Most days, it’s extremely informal and heavy on the art (drawing) and physical education (running around the park) and reading, with occasional forays into math and writing.

Annalie keeps telling me she loves being homeschooled because it means she can go to museums and learn to bake cupcakes as part of school, and I’m glad she feels that way. I know I love having her at home and being the one to teach her those things. And when I can put two and two together for her, connecting events from a book with items in a museum, or using her water bottle to explain condensation, I love it too. I don’t know if we’ll homeschool forever. I think Annalie probably would like more social peer interaction than she’s getting right now, and I’m working on that. It’s all a work in progress, much like life.

We ended our afternoon with an early dinner at Annalie’s favorite Mexican place. Chips and salsa, rice and beans, handmade tortillas, and saltwater taffy for dessert. It was a good day.