Look at me, blogging about something the same day it happened. It’s almost like I have a 10-month old now instead of a newborn.

Oh, right. I do have a 10-month-old! As of today, in fact. I do believe she’s going to be walking before she’s another month older.

Anyway. Today we had a fun visit with Carrie and her kids! We were originally planning to meet at a park between our two towns, but it rained last night and we weren’t enthused about the idea of trying to keep two babies entertained at a wet, muddy park. So we scrapped that plan and decided to just meet at Carrie’s house.

Annalie and Erik didn’t care much. When we got there, they immediately headed to the playroom in the basement and must’ve had fun because we didn’t see them again until we told them it was time to go get lunch.

We could walk to the Amish market from Carrie’s house, so that’s what we did. It was a pretty nice day, despite the drizzle we ended up walking through on the way home. The big kids ran ahead of us and got some of their wiggles out, while we pushed the babies in the strollers and enjoyed the mild weather and the fall colors that are just starting to show.

The market itself was quite interesting. There were a bunch of different stalls, selling all kinds of delicious things to eat—cheese, baked goods, produce, preserves and baking supplies like flour and nuts, candy, soft pretzels—as well as a restaurant, a meat counter, and a furniture showcasing a variety of beautiful wood tables, chairs, dressers, beds, and bookcases.

It seemed a little incongruous to me see all these men and women in plain dress (the women in long, modest dresses with their hair parted in the middle and pulled back under crisp white caps; the men in plain pants and button-down shirts with suspenders, most of them with beards and a fringe of hair cut straight across their foreheads), which is usually adopted by those who forsake the modern world and its conveniences, blithely using electronic scales and credit-card readers and cash registers. Carrie said it’s even funnier to see them outside on a break, using their cell phones.

We stopped at the deli counter and bought fried chicken, potato salad, and cucumber salad. We also bought half of a chocolate cake for dessert, then took it all back to Carrie’s house to eat. It probably won’t surprise you to hear that it was all completely, utterly delicious. I’m already plotting when I can go back and get more of that fried chicken.

After lunch Annalie and Erik went to the little neighborhood park to play, and Carrie and I hung out in the living room with Elliora and Elsa. It was probably a lot more fun for them that we were in a house full of toys instead of at the park, where Elliora probably wouldn’t have been able to crawl on the wet ground and Elsa would have been continually frustrated at not being able to keep up with the big kids. They are a bit too young to play together yet, but they got along pretty well, considering.

Elliora seemed to look at the living room full of toys she’d never played with and think, Right. I have a lot of work to do before we leave here! Then she set out to play with as many of them as she could.

Well, with as many as she could before Elsa grabbed them out of her hands, that is. I don’t blame Elsa one bit, though. Who was this young upstart coming into HER house and playing with HER toys!? At least Elliora took it good-naturedly. She just moved on to the next toy. By the time we left she was grabbing toys right back out of Elsa’s hands.

Then Elliora did something that kind of startled me: she imitated Elsa. Elsa had put a pillow on the floor and laid down with her head on it. When she got up, Elliora crawled over to the pillow and looked at it, looked over at Elsa, looked back at the pillow, and then laid down in the same position Elsa had just been in, with her head on the pillow. She sat up and grinned at me and Elsa, then laid back down and patted the pillow, just like she pats my chest when she’s snuggling with me, clearly quite pleased with herself. She’s growing up at the speed of light, that one. She’s got a big sister to keep up with!

We left not long after lunch, since it was naptime for the littles, waving good-bye and promising not to wait so long between visits next time. Thanks again for having us over and taking us to the Amish market, Carrie!

When I saw that one of the 7 Days themes was WHITE, this jumped to my mind as the obvious place to take a self-portrait when one lives in Washington, DC. The top left photo was my 7 Days shot, and the bottom right photo was Annalie’s.

Annalie was so hot she could barely even smile, poor kid. Her little furrowed brow in the bottom left photo slays me. This is what she had to say about the heat:

Today we went to downtown DC. It was SCORCHING hot. We went to Caribou Coffee and I had an apple fritter that was really good. It was so hot we went to an art gallery to cool off in the air-conditioning. We went there once before when I was little, but I don’t remember it. Since today’s theme was WHITE we took our picture in front of the White House. It was really fun! But it was so hot I almost didn’t want to do it. But I’m sort of glad that we did. I had fun!)

For the record, I didn’t think it was THAT hot on Wednesday, and I’m a pretty big wimp when it comes to heat and humidity. It was probably not quite 90F. But there is something about downtown DC that makes the heat seem especially unbearable.

Sarah just happened to be visiting New York with Suzy* during Sonja‘s visit to us in DC. So we went up for the day last Wednesday and hung out in Central Park. And now I’ve met both the 7 Days gods!

Thanks to Sonja for letting me steal this photo, which I think Troy took. I had to steal her photo instead of using one of my own. We’ve been busy running around and showing Sonja and Noah the sights—not to mention going to New York and Southern Maryland, and doing the everyday care and feeding that three small children require—and I have not managed to edit or Flickr any photos taken while Sonja has been here. She’s been pretty good about Flickring her photos, though. Head over to her photostream to see them!

*I’m not sure why Suzy absented herself from this photo, since she’s a 7 Dayer too! Silly Suzy.

The last time Troy’s mom and stepdad had the chance to visit us, we lived in Arizona and Annalie was still a baby. So we were all excited to hear that they were planning a visit to the East coast! Last week they drove from Texas to North Carolina to visit Troy’s sister and her family, and then last weekend they drove up here to see us.

Troy was still at work when Carol and Tom arrived, but Annalie stepped in and gave them the grand tour of our house, with special focus on the new tree swing in the backyard, the pumpkin dish full of candy corn in the entryway, and the fireplace that we’d just decorated for Halloween.

While we were all in the backyard, Annalie talked Grandma into playing catch with her for a little while. Notice Annalie’s outfit?

Aunt Dana had sent a Halloween shirt with Carol to give to Annalie as a gift. Annalie loved it and immediately created this whole outfit around it, right down to the socks.

After that, Annalie felt it was important that Grandpa Tom be introduced the wonders of Netflix Instant on our TV.

Tom was properly impressed. Half of James and the Giant Peach was watched. And then we met Troy for dinner at our favorite local steakhouse. After that, we decided to go see the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial.

Tom and Carol had both been to Washington, D.C. before, but years ago. There are a bunch of big monuments here now that weren’t there on their previous visits, the 9/11 Memorial among them. When Joe visited us in April, Troy took him to see the Pentagon one evening, and they both said the Memorial there was really neat at night. They were right. We’d been there during the daytime, so I’d seen it before, but the Memorial is lovely at night with all the lights on.

I especially like this ghostly photo I got of Annalie lying on one of the benches. There is a bench for each of the victims of the crash, with their names inscribed on the ends. The name on the end of the bench Annalie is lying on is LCDR David L. Williams, USN. Because of the direction the bench is facing, I can tell you that he was in the Pentagon on 9/11. The benches facing the other direction honor the people who were on the plane.

The next day, over a delicious breakfast of sausage, Trader Joe’s Ready-to-Bake Mini Morning Buns, and Blackened Home-Fried Potatoes from Hell, we asked Carol and Tom if there was anything else in particular they wanted to see in DC. Tom said he’d like to see the Lincoln Memorial again, and Carol said she was up for whatever we wanted to see.

We decided we’d start with the Lincoln Memorial and work our way around to a couple more memorials. So after breakfast we headed downtown.

As we walked to the Lincoln Memorial, Troy was telling Annalie a little about President Lincoln and why he was such an important man in our country’s history. When we got there, he read the Gettysburg Address to her from where it’s inscribed on the wall. Then Carol impressed us all by being able to recite half of it from memory. I memorized it in 7th grade and I can only recite about the first two sentences from memory.

Of course Annalie’s favorite thing about walking around the Mall is seeing the ducks. “Aww, look at the cute little duck butts!” is what she said when we saw these guys.

We walked down to the other end of the reflecting pool where we could see another newish memorial, the World War II Memorial. It’s a big one, with tons of fountains. Fountains are always a big hit with Annalie.

It was a warm day, and Annalie was hot from all our walking around, so she asked if she could put her hands in the pool of the big fountain. There are signs around the edge asking visitors to respect the memorial and not wade or throw coins in the water…but technically it says nothing about putting your hands and arms in.

Here is Troy taking a picture with his phone…

…this picture, in fact.

I handed the camera to Troy and asked him to take a picture of me and Annalie, because I realized I wasn’t going to be in any photos if I didn’t. As he got ready to take it, Annalie said, “Get a picture of me hugging my baby sister!” She also has conversations with my stomach and if I make the mistake of replying to something she’s said, she’ll look up at me and say, “I wasn’t talking to you, Mom. I was talking to my baby sister.”

That photo of Annalie and Tom cracks me up. Carol wanted to take a picture of them by the Texas pillar, since that’s where Tom and Carol live. Annalie was being pouty for some reason, Tom’s making a weird face and grabbing Annalie by the wrist…it’s just funny. Five seconds later we told Annalie pouting girls don’t get ice cream and she cheered right up and cooperated. The piggyback ride she got from Troy didn’t hurt her mood either.

As we were walking from the WWII Memorial over to the Vietnam Memorial, we stopped to rest on one of the many benches lining the path. I took the opportunity to take a picture for the photo wall, but Annalie wasn’t very smiley.

So I told her to think of the ice cream we would be buying for her in a few minutes, and that cheered her right up.

Annalie remembered the frozen lemonade I bought for her when we went sightseeing with Joe last spring, and immediately requested the same thing. Troy and I shared a bomb pop Liberty Rocket Pop.

Ice cream breaks are so refreshing.

Troy was confused about how exactly he was supposed to use his phone for money at this ancient “pay phone” we spotted along the pathway. And Annalie posed nicely for me in this spot looking towards Constitution Gardens and the Washington Monument. Troy noted that it was kind of a unique view, because there are no other buildings in sight. You can also just see the Capitol dome to Annalie’s left.

One of my favorite things about the Vietnam Wall it that it fairly begs to be touched. It’s counterintuitive; it’s a stark wall of black granite that seems like it should be forbidding. But somehow you can’t help but run your fingers over the names. And seeing what kinds of memorial offerings people leave is always interesting. On that day I saw several letters, roses, flags, and a military beret. This can of peaches with the fork rubber-banded to it struck me as particularly sad. It was such a specific thing, it told me the person who left it must have clear memories of the person he left it in honor of.

After we walked up from the Wall, we crossed this street where we had a not-usually-seen view of the Lincoln Memorial and headed back to the minivan since the time on our meter was about to run out of time. We had just enough time left to grab hot dogs from the vendor we were parked near.

When we first parked the car, while the adults spent a half-hour feeding $8.00 in change into the meter for our two hours of parking, Annalie wandered up the hill a little ways. When she came back down she announced that she’d seen a skeleton on the ground under the trees. We all sort of went, “Okay, uh-huh, let’s go see the sights!” Then when we went back to the car, she made a beeline for the skeleton and hollered for Troy to come look at it. He walked up to her, and I was surprised when I heard him say, “Huh. I guess it’s probably a squirrel skeleton.” Annalie thought it was totally cool and asked Troy to take a picture with his phone.

After our busy Saturday of sightseeing, we decided Sunday would be a good day for hanging out at home and relaxing. Carol and Annalie potted our recently-purchased mums for us, and then they did a little crafting. Carol usually has fun craft projects ready for Annalie to do when we visit them. This time she brought a project with her, a purse plus ribbons and rosettes for Annalie to decorate the purse with.

While they were doing that, I made eggs benedict for lunch because I find that kind of thing fun.

That afternoon, because I hadn’t gotten enough cooking in with the eggs benedict, I cooked the sugar pumpkin we’d bought the day before, then roasted the pumpkin seeds. When the pumpkin had cooled enough, I mashed it and Annalie and I made pumpkin spice cake. Annalie helped me grease and flour the pan, and then I showed her how to use her finger to gently draw pictures in the flour. I learned to do this from my piano teacher’s daughters when I was a kid. (It was at their house I also ate my first bagel, natural peanut butter, string cheese, and yogurt, before any of those foods were mainstream. They shopped at a food co-op long before it was trendy.)

While the cake was cooling, we killed some time at a nearby park. Well, really it’s the playground at a church, but it’s open to the public. Annalie calls it “the wooden park” because all the play structures are made out of wood.

Unfortunately, playing at the wooden park sometimes leads to the need for splinter removal. Annalie was very brave. The lollipop I gave her to suck on while Troy tweezed her splinters out helped, I’m sure.

After pizza for dinner and pumpkin cake for dessert, we headed to bed. Early the next morning, Tom and Carol loaded their stuff into the Durango. Troy, Annalie and I all got up early to see them off. We hugged them good-bye and took the traditional last-day photo with Annalie and her grandparents. It was a great visit. We hope they get to come visit again sometime, when there will be another grandchild in the picture!

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Oh riiiiight…I need to blog our Day 7 photos. I always kinda run out of steam at the end of 7 Days, after a whole week of creativity and blogging and commenting. Also, Friday was very tiring. It’s Sunday evening and I just now feel like I’m recovering.

Anyway! On Friday, we went down to Southern Maryland, where we used to live, to go to the county fair with some friends. It was horribly hot and mercilessly sunny (it must’ve been close to 100F on the fairgrounds, with all the people and animals and equipment) so the fair wasn’t as much fun as in previous years. But at least we got to see some friends, and Annalie and I got our beloved cotton candy!

In case you’re wondering, Annalie’s camouflage t-shirt says, “I’m hiding from you” and my t-shirt says “Reality is for people who can’t handle science fiction.”

Annalie took her Day 7 self-portrait in a funhouse mirror at the fair. Crazy!

We were able to meet up with the Kunzes for a ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl before they had to leave.

Annalie liked her first time on that ride, but she wasn’t interested in going again, thank you. I wish I could have gone but being six months pregnant pretty much means you’re doomed to watch while others ride.

Though not riding means that Troy and I got to hold Ashland while Bekah rode with 4-year-old Jack. She’s almost four months old and so smiley now!

We wandered through some of the buildings and checked out the exhibits of arts and crafts and photos. I love me some fair art. It’s always amazing to me how creative people can be in all sorts of media. Annalie played a couple of games and was really bummed she didn’t win any prizes, so we were happy to find an everyone’s-a-winner fishing game for kids. She was thrilled with her teddy bear.

Can you tell from Annalie’s pink cheeks how hot it was? We didn’t last very long, partly because of the heat and partly because we drank all the water we brought and the drinks at the fair were movie-theater expensive. So after a while we bailed, picked up a couple of Annalie’s friends and went to see a movie in town. Then we had dinner with friends—which was a good way to end a hot, sweaty, day that didn’t exactly go as expected—and headed home with our extra bag of cotton candy.

Our homeschooling year has officially started.

It started unofficially as soon we got home from California with Troy taking Annalie, at her request, to the Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Museum, the World War II Memorial (“You know that memorial with all the flags and fountains, that’s for a war that happened when Grandpa was a baby?”), and the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial. I say, when your six-year-old asks to visit museums and national memorials, you grant her request and pat yourself on the back for getting the school year off to a good start with a kid who’s eager to learn. (Note for next year: apparently Labor Day is a good day to visit those places; Troy said even though they were all open to the public hardly anyone else was around.)

I had originally planned to start doing daily lessons with Annalie the day after Labor Day, using our new Sonlight Curriculum, the entirety of which for the whole school year is pictured above on a shelf in our dining room. But even though I had received the boxes from Sonlight a week or two before we left for California, I never got around to opening them before we left. I wanted to give them my full attention, and in the days before our trip I was too scattered with laundry and lists and emails and planning. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to wait till we were back home from our trip. That’s the beauty of homeschooling, after all: I get to do things on my schedule.

Once we were back from our delightful, exhausting, jam-packed-with-friends-family-and-fun, mostly-yet-to-be-blogged two weeks, I decreed that we needed a few days to rest and ease back into real life. We caught up on our sleep, did some laundry, went to the grocery store and got back into the swing of meal-planning and -making. That Thursday was the emotional roller-coaster of Annalie’s first gymnastics class. I thought Saturday would be a good day to unpack our box of books and materials, but what with one thing and another Saturday got away from us. That seems to happen a lot with Saturdays.

Sunday morning, we went to church for the first time in weeks, thanks to all our travels at the end of summer. We spent some time relaxing at home, we ran some errands, and before I knew it the day was nearly over and we still had not opened that box.

Troy mentioned the box of books to me a couple of times over the course of the day, because he knew I’d planned to unpack everything and get myself organized that weekend. I had breezily agreed that yes, I was planning to do that, and then changed the subject, because even though it was bugging me and I knew I wanted to do it, I’ve suffered from Opposite Disease my whole life. I reminded Troy of this the last time he mentioned unpacking the school books to me—snapped at him, really, the poor guy. His only crime was knowing me and my tendency to procrastinate too well. So when he protested that he was only trying to help, I immediately apologized, hugged him, and said, “You know what? If you really want to help, could you come right now and help me clear off the dining room table so we can unpack the freaking box?” And of course he did exactly that, because he’s awesome.

After we cleared the table in about five minutes flat, I told Annalie that we were going to open the box of school books. She said, “All right! I’ve been waiting and waiting for this. Can I help!?” I told her, of course she could help, these were her books! Can you guess what happened then?

She sat at the table with us for the next hour and a half as we unpacked and went through all the books and supplies. She was particularly interested in the science and history books, but was also very excited to see that Charlotte’s Web was one of her read-aloud books, and when she recognized Put Me in the Zoo and Little Bear among her reading books. Can you guess what happened next? Because it surprised the heck out of Troy and me.

I said that I needed to go through all the books and check them off on the invoice, to make sure we weren’t missing anything. Annalie said, “I can help! I’ll read the books to you and you can check them off.”

I blinked at her. Was this the same kid who gets squirrelly if I ask her to read the “DONT WALK” sign at a street crossing, a sign that she knows perfectly well what it says? I was pretty sure it was the same kid.

I told her I would love it if she read the book titles to me, that it would be very helpful. I expected her to read two or three and then get tired. But she stuck it out and read almost every book title to me. She needed help with some of them, but she read or sounded out a good three-fourths of the book titles almost entirely on her own. She was up almost an hour past her bedtime but I didn’t care at all, because she was voluntarily reading something. Once she rubbed her eyes, and I said if she was tired we could put her to bed. She admitted she was a little tired but she wanted to keep going till we were done. Oooookay then, keep reading, kid!

She keeps doing stuff like this, insisting she can’t read and then casually reading an entire sentence somewhere before back-pedaling and insisting that she really can’t read, she just looked at the words and guessed, that’s all, honest! It’s hilarious and touching at the same time.

I’m not sure what her mental block about reading is, because she clearly has the skills to read. It’s more like she isn’t ready to read on her own, like she wants the security blanket of having someone there to read to her. We’ve reassured her many times that no matter how good she gets at reading, no matter how old she gets, that we will always happily read to her if she wants us to. We encourage her, applaud her successes, and try not to pressure her into reading more than she wants to. Because she will read when she’s ready—or, apparently, when I need help comparing the contents of a shipment against the invoice. But you know, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if she goes back to insisting that she can’t read tomorrow. And that’s okay; she’s only six years old. She has years and years of learning and reading ahead of her. It’s okay if she wants to stay a kid a little bit longer.

[Warning! Long aside about homeschooling philosophies and the benefits of delaying education ahead! I was totally planning to write a quick breezy post about our first few days of the school year and I have no idea where this came from except yes I do. I am opinionated as heck and am pretty much constitutionally incapable of not sharing my opinions with the world. Feel free to skip the next four paragraphs if you want to. You'll know it's safe to start reading again when you see photos.]

I was just talking about this with Bonnie the other day, actually. She was telling me that although she does not consider herself a wholesale follower of the Waldorf education philosophy for a variety of reasons, one of the things she does like about Waldorf is that it strongly encourages delaying formal math or reading lessons until children are at least 7 or 8 years old, until they are fully awake to the world.

This echoed a discussion I’d just been having with Sonja and Brenda about how some European countries similarly delay lessons until those ages, thinking that for younger kids playing and exploring the world is more important than an early knowledge of letters or numbers.

And you know, as someone who’s worked with all ages of kids in a variety of settings over the past 20 years, I can see the merit in that way of thinking. Preschool-aged kids vary wildly in their ability to sit still, to pay attention, to master the fine-motor skills necessary to move a pencil across the page, to grasp abstract concepts like the fact that 2+2=4 or that the letters “c-a-t” represent that furry, pointy-eared animal that purrs and meows. But by the time kids reach second grade, the playing field has leveled for most of them. The kids who were singing their ABC’s before they were potty-trained are probably still at the head of the class, but now most of the kids who were struggling to write their names in kindergarten have probably caught up to the pack and are reading and writing just fine…that is, if they weren’t labeled as “special needs” and made fun of by the other kids because they were “slow.”

This is not to say that some kids don’t have learning disabilities or other geniune special needs, because of course some of them do, and receiving specialized help is a necessity for them. But much like the probable over-diagnosis of ADHD in our culture, I’d be willing to bet that many kids who struggle early on would struggle a lot less, which would breed confidence and further academic success, if reading instruction were delayed until they were older. (Insert disclaimer here about how I’m not a professional of any kind, just someone who’s spent a lot of time with a lot of kids. Thank you for not throwing rocks at me; it would only damage your own computer monitors.)

Anyway! Pay no attention to that wild-eyed idealogue hunched over her laptop.

We started lessons using the curriculum materials on Tuesday. We’re starting off slow, since Annalie has never been in a formal classroom setting before, and only did a devotion and a couple of subjects from the lesson plan, history and reading. Today we added science to the schedule. At Annalie’s request, we did two days’ worth of science lessons, because why not? Again, that’s the beauty of homeschooling. Tomorrow we might add math, we’ll see how it goes.

Did I mention the lesson plan? The best thing about using this particular curriculum, in my opinion, is that it comes with a complete 36-week lesson plan, which will totally save me when I have a newborn in the house. That’s the main reason I decided to use a pre-packaged curriculum this year instead of going with the unschooling approach I used last year: I am having a baby smack in the middle of the school year and will need the structure. Even when I’m sleep-deprived and breastfeeding every 90 minutes and doing quadruple the usual laundry, I won’t have to worry about figuring out what we’re going to do for school. I’ll just need to open the binder to the right week and look at the plan.

One of the things we did that first day was a spelling pre-test, and Annalie aced it. She was very proud of her 100% and gold star. She specifically requested that I take a picture so she could show her grandmas what a good speller she was on her first day of school. Then she put down her dry-erase board and asked me in a serious, concerned tone, “But when is recess?” That’s my girl, keeping her priorities straight.

I wasn’t exactly worried about homeschooling this year. After all, I’ve been homeschooling Annalie her whole life. I am confident I have a broad-enough knowledge base to teach a first-grader the basics and maybe even a few frills. I have no doubt that homeschooling is the right choice for our family at this time.

It’s just that this year, it felt more official, what with having to file a Notice of Intent to Homeschool with the local school superintendent; not to mention knowing that at the end of the year I’ll need to either provide standardized test results showing that Annalie is in the top quartile of kids her age, or a letter from someone with more edumacation than I (i.e., a Master’s degree) stating that she is learning as she should. And it’s not that I have a problem with keeping the Man informed, or that I’m worried Annalie won’t learn this year. It was just unfamiliar territory, this whole curriculum thing, and it made me slightly uneasy.

But now that I’ve familiarized myself with the materials a bit, and now that we’ve done a couple of days’ worth of lessons, I’m wondering why I wasted time worrying. We will kick butt at this homeschooling thing. I’m pretty sure we could finish the school year by March, if we really wanted to. We most likely won’t, because we’re going to make time for field trips and baking and traveling (gotta take the new baby around to meet far-flung family members) and photography and hanging out with friends.

And recess, of course. We’ll always make time for recess.

p.s. New banner! This is one of my favorites. Thanks, B!

See how happy Annalie is in the above photo? She’s excited because she’s about to get her very own balloon animal, at long last.

A couple of years ago, we were at Spaghetti Works, one of our favorite restaurants in Omaha, and there was a balloon lady there. Annalie saw her while we were waiting to be seated, and asked if she would come to our table. We told her that she probably would, and that she could get a balloon animal if she did. Annalie spent that whole meal waiting and waiting for the balloon lady to come around. We finally asked about her, and were told that she had to leave. Annalie was heartbroken. We assured her that the next time we were there, if the balloon lady was back, we’d be sure to ask her to stop at our table. Since then, we’ve been to that same restaurant a half-dozen times but the balloon lady has never been back.

So when the balloon man stopped at our table as we were having lunch with friends in San Diego yesterday and asked if anyone would like a balloon, I watched Annalie’s eyes light up and knew I had to say yes. She chose a zebra, and all the kids watched with fascination as a zebra with a blue mane and stripes was deftly fashioned out of several long, thin balloons and a few strokes of black Sharpie. Annalie declared her balloon zebra was named Coyote, and that she loved him and would keep him forever.

“Remember that he’s made out of balloons, and balloons tend to pop after a while,” I cautioned her. “Enjoy him and have fun playing with him while he lasts, but know that he won’t last forever.”

Annalie looked stricken for a moment and said, “But I don’t want him to pop! I love him, and I’ll take him everywhere and take really good care of him!” I told her that I knew she’d be a good mother to her balloon zebra, but I just wanted her to keep in mind that balloons don’t last, so she wouldn’t be too sad when he was gone.

Before the meal was even over, one of the balloons that made up his hind legs popped. The balloon guy happened to be passing by when it happened, and he quickly repaired the damage with another balloon, cheerfully waving off my attempt to tip him for the repair.

After lunch, we set off towards the park so the kids could run around. We’d been walking maybe five minutes when Annalie tried to hand Coyote to me, saying she was tired of carrying him. I told her that she could carry him a while longer. She shrugged and walked on ahead of me.

Five or ten minutes later, Annalie decided she was really tired of carrying Coyote. She gave him to her friend E, who carried him for a minute before deciding he didn’t really want a balloon zebra. Next Annalie tried giving the zebra to E’s sister M, who politely declined. Bug didn’t want the balloon animal either. Noah wanted him, but with the enthusiasm for life that is typical of two-year-olds, he probably would have popped the balloons within a few minutes, so his mom said no thank you for him. Annalie pressed Coyote on me again, and since I had a shopping bag by that time, I took him and placed him in the bag with my purchases.

Later, on the 90-minute drive from San Diego back to Brenda‘s house, Annalie spent a half-hour or so carefully untwisting the balloons until she had a long white snake marked with black stripes and a deflated blue balloon. Then she lost interest and abandoned the whole thing in the backseat of the car, where it slowly deflated overnight.

RIP, Coyote. You were loved briefly but fiercely, and you entertained my daughter well.

Photos taken at Old Cape Henry Lighthouse in Virginia Beach.

After a busy day full of teaching dottery class and attending birthday parties, we hopped in the minivan and drove to Delaware, to the beach-town cottage where Anna and her family had just arrived the day before. We got there late, but Anna was kind enough to stay up and let us in before stumbling off to bed. We followed her example and went right to sleep, expecting all the kids to be up bright and early the next morning.

All three kids were kind enough to sleep in the next morning, not getting us up till after 7am. We ate cereal and pastries for breakfast and drank our coffee in a leisurely fashion while the kids played. Then we suited up and sunblocked everyone and headed for the beach!

It was so much fun! Since Annalie has lost her fear of the ocean, she loves the beach. And with so many adults there, she was able to play in the water as much as she wanted, only taking occasional breaks to play in the sand or have a drink. She had an enthusiastic water buddy in Anna’s son, J. They had a blast chasing the waves and each other around the beach.

But the best water buddy of all for Annalie was Troy. Dads are great when it comes to big waves that threaten to knock you down. They either grab your hand and haul you up quickly, sputtering and wiping salt from your eyes, or they just pick you up and swing you above the wave! Annalie loved doing both. I was kind of amazed at how many times she was knocked onto her knees or butt by a wave, yet came up laughing.

After a few hours in the sun and water, we were all hungry. Anna’s husband M and Troy, with Apple* tagging along, walked to a nearby pizza place and came back with some delicious pizzas that we devoured and two huge insulated jugs of soda plastered with the restaurant logo. Those cups kept tripping me out, because to me the logo seemed similar to an old logo for my favorite hometown pizza place. I’d see them out of the corner of my eye and be startled for a second before realizing it was a different logo entirely. Funny how that can happen.

*In case you’re wondering, Apple is not Anna’s daughter’s real name. It’s her blog name.

After lunch the kids went back in the water with the dads for a little while, but soon we were all ready to go home and cool off. So we packed up and made the short walk back to the cottage, where we enjoyed using the outdoor shower.

After everyone was cleaned up, M and Apple laid down for a nap. We got the big kids set up for some quiet time watching movies with the portable DVD player in the bedroom. Troy found something to watch on TV. And Anna and I decided, naturally, to go paint some pottery.

There happens to be a cool little craft studio on the main street of Anna’s beach town, and she’d been walking by and peeking in the windows for years, but had never gone inside. So we changed that! Anna had never painted pottery before, but she’d been painting houses for years, thanks to working for her dad, so she was a natural at pottery-painting.

I dotteried two little things, a star magnet for Melissa and a green bowl for Sonja. I was happy to find two little things to paint, because this particular place had a per-hour studio fee. I understood why—they’re on the beach, they probably have lots of tourists as customers and need to keep things flowing; and they guarantee your pieces will be fired by the next day, which of course means the fee will be higher than usual—but I still didn’t want to have to pay for more than an hour of painting! Also, we didn’t want to be gone all afternoon and leave Troy and M outnumbered by tired and hungry kids. So we painted, chatted, laughed, and walked back home.

On the way home from the craft studio, something funny happened: I was spotted in the wild by a blog reader! I didn’t know about it till we were back at home and she left a comment on a blog post. She wasn’t entirely sure it was me because Annalie wasn’t with me, I was in the wrong town, and she was a bit shy of saying hello to a total stranger. I emailed back in reply to her comment, saying I completely understood why she hadn’t said anything to me, but that I wished she had, that it would have been a hoot to have a blog reader recognize me on the street. I asked where she had seen me, exactly, and she emailed me back to tell me that she saw me on this street at that time by such-and-such building, and as it happened I remembered seeing her too! Crazy! For future reference, if any of you normal, friendly, non-stalker blog readers happen to pass me somewhere on the street, please feel free to stop me and say hello. I promise I don’t bite and I’ll even say hello back.

Photo by i am BeachMama

After our unknowing encounter with Miss Virginia, Anna and I continued home where we found hungry people waiting for us. We walked to a fun Italian place, where Annalie and J made good use of the play-dough I keep stashed in my purse for entertaining bored kids at restaurants while we’re waiting for food. Some of the TVs in the restaurant were showing an episode of Amen, which amused me greatly. I had completely forgotten about that late-80s show, both that it existed and that I ever watched it. But even without being able to hear the sound, I could hear the theme song in my head as the credits played.

We ate the delicious food, we walked back to the cottage, we packed up, we hugged our hosts good-bye and thanked them profusely for letting us crash their beach vacation. Then we headed home after a long, delightful weekend so we could start doing laundry and packing for our trip to Omaha later that week. We just don’t know how to stay in one place, do we?

I baked Annalie’s birthday cake (for our family party on her actual birthday) and dyed the frosting to Annalie’s specifications: a strawberry-lemon cake with lemon cream-cheese frosting. I would link to the recipe I used for the cake except I sort of made it up as I went along, combining parts of a few different recipes for the cake. Basically I used this recipe for strawberry cupcakes and added a tablespoon of lemon zest to the batter. Having made those strawberry cupcakes before, though, I knew that I liked the texture of these lemon cupcakes better, so I added a couple of extra eggs to the batter because that was the main difference between the two recipes. The cream cheese frosting I always make is this one, and again I added a couple of teaspoons of lemon zest to it to make it lemony.

When it came time to decorate the cake, I frosted it with the green frosting (“Green, like grass where the daisies grow, Mom!”) and then let Annalie decorate it all by herself. I remember decorating my own cakes when I was a kid and how much fun I had with them. Watching Annalie make her cake beautiful in her own way was just as much fun. And I think she did a pretty good job!

Because Troy had to go to work on Annalie’s birthday, which was also Mother’s Day, we had a late-morning present-opening and cake-cutting before Troy left. But first, the obligatory family birthday portrait:

Wish-making, blowing out the candles, and finally—FINALLY, as far as Annalie was concerned—the present-opening.

One of the gifts Annalie got from me and Troy was two books about ancient Egypt, a subject that has fascinated her for a while now.Once she’d opened them she spent several minutes looking at them, forgetting she had a stack of presents yet to open.

Once the birthday celebration was done, it was time for Troy to go to work. He put on this Homer Simpson shirt with the quote, “I’m here for the beer,” as a sort of joke protest that he had to work on Mother’s Day AND his daughter’s birthday. When he got to work, he sat around for an hour waiting for his boss to get out of a meeting, only to be told, “I was gonna call you last night and tell you that you didn’t have to come in to work today, but I didn’t have your home number. Sorry.” You better believe Troy gave him every phone number and email address he could think of on the spot.

The prettiest stage of homemade pizza, before the colorful veggies and herbs are covered with delicious cheese. (This is basically the same pizza I blogged here, if you’d like the recipe.)

A silly photo taken of some silly kids after Christa’s birthday party, the weekend after Annalie’s. We had fun at the movie party, but unfortunately it’s really hard to take good photos inside a dark movie theater which is where the majority of the party took place. So this is the best photo I got. Also I had just come down with a cold and wasn’t my usual photo-taking self that day.

Our favorite Chinese restaurant in Southern Maryland has fancy new receipts with the dishes’ names on them in Chinese! I thought that was pretty cool.

When Joe came to visit us a while back, he left this shopping bag from Tiffany & Co. for Annalie. His step-grandma had packed him some snacks for the road in it. Joe said, “Who packs chocolate chip cookies and grapes in a Tiffany bag!? I’m leaving this here for Annalie to play with so Kassie doesn’t see it and get hugely disappointed when there’s nothing sparkly for her in it.” Annalie has appreciated it, Joe!

We had brunch one day at a nearby diner. The food was good, the coffee was hot and bottomless, and the atmosphere was awesome.

One of the few days it wasn’t raining when my mom was here, we went downtown to see some sights. My mom took this photo of us in front of a fountain near the Natural History Museum, which I completely love because of the look on Annalie’s face.

These are probably my two favorite photos that I took while we were sightseeing that day. I took the one on the left with a really fast shutter speed (1/2500 second, to be exact) and the one on the right with a relatively slow shutter speed (1/13 second). I don’t really know how to use all the bells and whistles on my fancy D40, but I like playing with the settings I do know how to work. I’m learning, slowly but surely.

One of the sights we hit that day was the Butterfly Pavilion at the Museum of Natural History. Annalie had been wanting to go there for ages and was really excited about it. Which is why it was so heartbreaking that once we got inside, she was freaked out by all the butterflies darting everywhere in the small space. She wanted to like it, and she tried to hold it together, but after about a minute she’d had enough and asked to leave with tears in her eyes. We talked about it afterwards and Annalie said she was nervous about a butterfly landing on her head. We also decided that maybe because there were a lot of other people in the pavilion at the same time, talking and taking pictures, it was a bit overwhelming. We plan to try again on a weekday when it won’t be so busy, and Annalie plans to wear a hat.

We also went to the National Gallery of Art to see their da Vinci painting of Ginevra de’ Benci. Annalie has a kids’ book about Leonardo da Vinci, and in the end it lists all the paintings shown in the book and the galleries that own them. She was completely excited to learn that the National Gallery had one of the paintings, which meant we could go see it in person. Sadly, the day we were there they were doing some work on the gallery where the da Vinci painting is displayed, so it was closed and we didn’t get to see the painting we wanted to see.

Man, now that I think about it, that was two big disappointments in one day for Annalie. Poor kid. You never would have known it to see her, though. She was bummed about the butterflies at first, but then she was happy looking through the observation window and told us excitedly how one butterfly landed really close to where she was looking, so she got to see it up close. And when she found out the gallery with the da Vinci was closed, she just sort of sighed and went back to looking at the map of the gallery. Have I ever mentioned how this kid loves maps?

There’s a bit of a funny story about the National Gallery map, actually. When we first got there we grabbed maps and started trying to figure out where the da Vinci painting would be. I couldn’t remember the name of it, but I knew it was a 14th-century(ish) Italian painting, so I opened the map and was puzzling over the various galleries when Annalie said, “Oh, here’s the da Vinci painting right here! It’s on the cover of the map.” And so it was, along with its name and location.

You may have noticed several photos of my mom and Annalie with recognizable buildings and monuments in the background. That’s because we were taking photos with my mom’s postcard in mind. She always sends postcards to various friends and great-nieces and -nephews and godchildren when she’s out of town. Sometimes she buys them 4/$1 at Walgreens, and sometimes I make her a personalized photo card.

It’s kind of funny to me how fast I can make these now. I remember the first couple of years I made Christmas photo cards, it took me a month of tweaking and editing to get it just right. Now I can whip one out in an hour or two.

I tried my hand at smitten kitchen’s braided lemon bread a few weeks back. It wasn’t hard to make, just a bit fiddly with multiple steps. I probably won’t make it again, though. It was tasty, but I didn’t love it.

I did get to make a little mini-loaf from the scraps I cut off before fake-braiding the loaf, though. That was kinda fun.

I’m really starting to think that Annalie is a natural artist. She draws constantly, usually in small notebooks or on index cards when she can get them. And the drawings come so effortlessly to her, like she’s just dashing them off. I wish she would draw more on large pieces of plain white paper because I love so many of her drawings and would like to frame them, and lined paper just doesn’t work that well for framing. But at least I can take photos of the best ones, like this giraffe who is eating something (you can tell ‘cuz his tongue is out) and the pelican and the ocean wave. I keep thinking I need to find some fun art lessons for her. I bet she’d love that.

p.s. New banner’s up! Thanks again, Brenda.