Isn’t this skirt great? I bought from Rebecca Brayton’s Etsy shop as a birthday present for Annalie, hoping it would take the place of the tulle underskirt that goes with the Cinderella dress CC made for her three years ago, the one she wears all the time, despite the fact that it’s got a waist-high slit and is not a skirt but a petticoat. Anyway, this seems to have done the trick. I have not seen her wearing the increasingly ratty petticoat since it arrived. And it’s fun to twirl in!

I just looked at the date on my previous post. How have I not written anything new for four days!? The time, she gets away from me. It’s partly because we had a birthday party to attend this weekend out of town, which meant an overnight stay in a really nice hotel with a great swimming pool, which I would have enjoyed a lot more if Annalie had not woken up at 5:50am (after not falling asleep till 10pm the night before) asking if it was time to go swimming yet. Oy. But then my mom and I got to go paint pottery tonight with my friend Rebekah, which was awesome. I forget how painting makes me feel all calm and energized at the same time till I’m doing it again. And tonight I even painted something non-dotty, which I don’t do very often so whenever I do I’m all pleased with myself for breaking out of my rut.

Also, that cold that Troy had for four days a couple of weeks back, the one that required him to blow his nose a dozen times or so? I caught that cold, which means I went through more Puffs Plus on my first day of being sick than he did in the whole duration of his cold. If I’m lucky I’ll be all better by June. So instead of staying up late to blog about Annalie’s birthday party which was last weekend, I’m going to bed. If I don’t post anything new for a few days, just assume I’m busy blowing my nose and drinking mug after mug of hot peppermint tea with honey. And let’s all hope that before I know it, I’m back to feeling like Annalie looks in this photo.

As we arrived home from running errands, Annalie asked if she could play in the backyard. Thinking wistfully of my plan to turn on a kids’ TV show and crash on the couch for 20 minutes while she watched, I said, of course you can play in the backyard.

I’m sitting on the deck now, listening to Annalie sing a song about all the plants and animals, and how she’s going to make the world a gree-ee-ee-ner and beh-eh-eh-ter plaaaaace. I’m taking deep breaths, and fighting the urge to go inside and get something done.

Annalie bounds up the deck stairs, carefully carrying something in her cupped hands. She kisses me on the cheek and spills her treasures into my lap. “For you, Mommy! Aren’t they beautiful?” She has brought me two buttercups and two baby wild strawberries. I ask Annalie if she knows the red things are strawberries, and she says, “They are!? We got a whole patch of ‘em down there!” She runs back down the stairs, her voice drifting up to me as she exclaims that she can’t believe we have wild strawberries in our yard.

I think about getting up to empty the scuzzy water from the wading pool, but decide I will wait till Troy is home to help me. Also I don’t want to put my feet in that gross water, and that’s the only way to empty this pool, with its collapsible plastic walls. Instead, I sit on my deck in the middle of tall, green trees. I sip my drink and listen to the birds singing and Annalie playing and I enjoy being still, while it lasts.

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?