What is something you mom always says to you?
“Annalie, I love you.”

What makes your mom happy?
When I give you a hug and a kiss…like right now!

What makes your mom sad?
When I do something I’m not supposed to, like eat too much candy, or sneak.

How does your mom make you laugh?
By tickling me. Do it!

What did your mom like to do when she was a child?
I think you liked to draw and sketch a lot.

How old is your mom?
75? What? Wasn’t it a close guess?

How tall is your mom?
You are…78 feet? And you weigh, um, 70 pounds.

What is her favorite thing to watch on TV?
Doctor Who.

What does your mom do when you’re not around?
Watch movies that kids can’t watch. And blog and twitter.

If your mom becomes famous, what will it be for?
Hmmm…[grinning]…for being the world’s longest blogger!

What is your mom really good at?
Sketching and being nice.

What is your mom not very good at?
Being able to reach stuff really high up.

What does your mom do for her job?
Dottery. What? You’re gonna be a teacher doing it!

What is your mom’s favorite food?
Chinese. Especially pork-fried rice.

What makes you proud of your mom?
You’re really nice to me most of the time, and you’re really good at loving me.

If your mom were a cartoon character, who would she be?
You’d be a starfish on Spongebob. Not Patrick, just a starfish.

What do you and your mom do together?
Paint, watch Doctor Who, play together, and help each other.

How are you and your mom the same?
We both have blue eyes, the same DNA, and when you were little you had really blond hair like me.

How are you and your mom different?
Well, you have a little bit of long hair, and it’s dark. And I have short hair, and it’s light. I like to draw a lot, and you like to paint.

How do you know your mom loves you?
Because you give me hugs and kisses.

What does your mom like most about your dad?
He’s nice and he can reach things and he takes care of stinkbugs for us.

Where is your mom’s favorite place to go?
That Pottery Place.

I did this same interview last year. For the record, I did indeed like to draw and sketch a lot as a kid; Doctor Who is in fact one of my favorite shows; I am going to teach a class in painting dottery at my local pottery-painting studio at the end of this month; I do love Chinese food but I wouldn’t say pork fried rice is my favorite; and That Pottery Place could certainly be called one of my favorite places. However, I’m not 75 years old nor 78 feet tall, and I weigh considerably more than 70 pounds.

I think this was a Facebook meme originally, but I first saw it at Wannabe Hippie and Zebrabelly.

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.

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!)