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?

Last weekend was Bug’s 4th birthday, and there was a party to celebrate, of course. Being the unique kid that she is, Bug had a unique theme in mind: rainbows and seeds. Brenda, although she is the queen of themes and is crazy about planning parties, had pretty much the same reaction you probably just did. I believe the technical term for that reaction is, Huh?

But after some sketching and thinking and researching, Brenda figured out a way to do the rainbow-seed theme that made both her and Bug happy.

One of the party activities was planting seeds in small terracotta pots, which the kids then got to take home as their party favors.

Another activity was making mosaics on paper plates with a variety of dried beans, AKA seeds.

Incorporating seeds into the food was easy. Brenda served a variety of nuts, a two-bean salad, hummus (made from chickpeas!), and sesame-seed bagels with peanut butter and Nutella. To go with the other part of the theme, there were fruits and veggies in a rainbow of colors…and a rainbow candy bar! You can’t really see it that well in any of the photos I took, but there was a line of jars at the back of the food table filled with Skittles, colorful chocolate-coated sunflower seeds, Jolly Ranchers, and Pixy Stix.

Needless to say, the candy bar was a BIG hit. Annalie kept asking me who was going to eat the giant rainbow lollipops that Brenda had stuck in a vase as a colorful centerpiece. I told her that they were as big as her head, and no one was going to eat them. But the rest of the candy definitely got sampled. Especially the chocolate-covered sunflower seeds and the Pixy Stix! The kids could not get enough of those.

Did you know, by the way, that Pixy Stix were originally marketed as a fruit drink mix under a different name? And that the powder in Pixy Stix is the same powder in Lik-M-Aid pouches? And that SweeTarts are a compressed form of Pixy Stix powder, originally invented because moms were complaining about the sticky, gritty powder? I learned all that just now from the Wikipedia page about Pixy Stix when I did a quick Google search for the correct spelling of the candy name.

Brenda performed some magic with paper and her sewing machine to make these fantastic rainbow-cirle dingle-dangle decorations. (She details how she made them in her post about Bug’s party, if you’re interested.) Then at the end of the day she took them down, folded them up, and gave each party guest one to take home.

That’s Brenda’s secret to having an uncluttered home, by the way: she gives most of her art projects away. I currently have about 37 different wreaths, mobiles, cardboard ghosts and Christmas trees, and milk-jug angels that Brenda made and gave to us that Annalie will NOT let me throw out. I think some of that stuff is going to get “lost in the move.” That is why my home isn’t more cluttered than it is: every time we move we have to unpack a zillion boxes. That is a great incentive for getting rid of a bunch of stuff, so we won’t have to unpack so much the next time! And it’s easy to get rid of stuff as you’re unpacking boxes. I actually look forward to that part of moving.

Brenda also made coloring sheets, and I should really have a picture of Annalie’s sheet to show you, but I don’t. Normally she’s not that into coloring and does a pretty haphazard job. That day for some reason she took her time and the end result was great. Maybe it was because Superchic was there coloring with her, and she was taking her time and making her picture look pretty. Annalie does respond well to competition, which is totally foreign to me because I don’t. Give me a little competition and usually I will back away and go find something else to do, just out of stubbornness.

My main contributions to the party, as you may have figured out from the title of this post, were cupcakes and crocheted rainbow balls. Brenda came up with the fun name rainballs, which I like because it kinda matches the snowballs I also crochet.

I was originally going to make a 6-layer cake with each layer a different color of the rainbow, but at the last minute Brenda got these cute little rainbow lollipops and decided they’d make great cupcake toppers. The rainbow cake would have been fun to make, but I love cupcakes so the last-minute change was fine by me. I made the same Lemon Cupcakes with Lemon Cream that I made for my birthday last year, with lemon cream cheese frosting (a couple of teaspoons of lemon zest added to my favorite cream cheese frosting recipe).

A note about the cupcake recipe: The original recipe said it would make four cupcakes. (Jen’s reaction to that was an incredulous, “Why? Why on earth would anyone want to only make FOUR cupcakes!?”) I wanted to make 24, so I multiplied each of the ingredients by six. That resulted in a recipe with 4 1/2 cups of flour, 3 cups of sugar, 12 eggs, and 3 sticks of butter. That’s an entire package of eggs and a whole cup and a half of butter, people. I knew, just from looking at the amounts, that this recipe would not make a mere 24 cupcakes. I was going to get at least 36 cupcakes out of it. But I figured it was better to be safe than sorry and it’s not like the extra cupcakes were going to go to waste, so I forged ahead. In the end, I made 36 largeish cupcakes and eight mini-cupcakes.

The moral of my story is, if you make this recipe you’re going to get more cupcakes than you were promised. But you really won’t mind because they are delicious. In fact, I think I’ll go get one of the extra cupcakes out of my fridge right now.

We used the rainballs for a ball-toss game. Brenda told the kids they’d get a piece of candy for a prize when they got a ball through, so at random times throughout the party kids would walk over to the game, shove a ball through one of the holes, then run over to their moms and ask if they could have a prize. It was pretty funny, but at least they were working a little bit for their sugar. And then at the end of the party, each kid got to pick one rainball to take home.

The rainballs were originally going to be part of the flowerpot party favors, but for reasons it would take too long to explain, the plan changed. I’m glad I made them anyway, because the ball-toss game was fun and the kids all loved the colorful, soft balls. I was already thinking of making more when someone emailed to request a custom order of five rainballs and five snowballs.

Even though I roll my eyes a lot at Brenda when she’s in party-planning mode, I have to admit that I’ve really come to enjoy her particular brand of crazy when it comes to themes and parties. I will never be as detailed as she is, but I have learned a few tricks from planning a few parties with her. I think I might even use those tricks for future parties. In any case, Brenda is only an email away if I need help.

Thanks for inviting us to your 4th birthday party, Bug! We’re so glad we were still here to be a part of it. We hope you had as fantastic a time as we did.

What is your name?

Annalie.

How old are you?

Five. And a half.

Where do you live?

In San Diego.

Do you have any pets?

Yep.

Do you want to tell me about them?

Yep. You see, there’s two of them and they’re cats, and their names are Katy and Lily. Katy has blue eyes and Lily has green eyes.

Who do you like to play with?

Bug.

What’s your favorite cereal?

The yogurt one. [Strawberry Yogurt Trader Joe O's]

What’s your favorite vegetable?

Strawberries and blueberries.

But those are fruits.

I know, but those are the ones I like. I guess I like carrots…actually, corn.

What’s your favorite drink?

Sprite.

What’s your favorite snack?

Peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And popcorn with butter and sometimes salt.

What’s your favorite toy?

Dolly, my dolphin.

What’s your favorite TV Show?

Fairly OddParents.

What’s your favorite movie?

Hmm…pause! [She was asking me to pause the interview because she needed to think about it.] My favorite movie is…a TV one: the Phineas & Ferb Christmas special!

What’s your favorite game?

I like to play catch a lot, with my Gramaw.

What’s your favorite book?

The one about a long time ago, the one I got for Christmas.

You mean the Little House on the Prairie books?

No. It was about the stories a long, long time ago, like Jesus and the flaming bush…

Oh, the Bible? Your Bible storybook?

Yes! That’s it.

What’s your favorite restaurant?

The place in Maryland that has hot dogs.

You mean Five Guys?

Yeah! Five Guys.

What’s your favorite holiday?

Christmas, because we give, and it’s really fun, and we get new stuff and we give some stuff up for other people who don’t have very much money.

What’s your favorite animal?

Horses.

If you could change your name, what name would you choose?

You know which one, Mommy. [in unison with me] Sarah!

What do you love about each person in our family?

I love that Daddy is really really funny, and he goes to work every day so I don’t get to play with him much. That makes it even more fun, ‘cuz I don’t usually get to play with him.

While I’m boring, because you see me all the time, right?

[A diplomatic silence is maintained, as Annalie scrunches up her nose and smiles at me.]

So what do you love about me?

What I love most about you is that you care about me a lot, and you are glad that I like going in the water now, so that way you can go in the water now, and go in the stepping area, and I can go in the water about up to my knees, or my feet. So we’re both happy!

What do you love most about yourself?

That I like cooking and painting, and I think a lot of things are funny.

Where would you like to go on vacation this year?

I would like to go on vacation to…Hawaii.

Really? Why do you want to go to Hawaii?

Because it sounds like a fun place to go to.

Where did you hear about Hawaii, do you know?

Um, it was actually in the movie Ice Age. You know, where that squirrel falls in the ice and he floats all the way to Hawaii.

What are we doing that’s a big change this year?

It’s a big change that we’re going back to…it’s a big change… [Annalie picks up a toy guitar and begins singing.] It’s a big change where we’re going back, we’re going back to Washington Dee Seee-eee-EEE! We’re moo-oo-oo-oo-OO-oo-oo-oo-VING!

Why are we doing that? Did we just decide, “Eh, we’re tired of California, we’re gonna go now”?

[Still singing] Because my fa-ther’s in the Na-a-a-a-vy!

What are some of your wishes for this year?

My wish is to help people and clean up the world. And I wish that Daddy would come home very very soon.

Good news, Daddy is coming home soon, in just a couple of weeks!

Oh, all right!

Thanks for the interview, Annalie!

Annalie’s self-portrait, age 5y8m

Inspiration for this interview originally came from New Year’s Interview for Kids at Blissfully Domestic (via The Crafty Crow). I don’t scrapbook, but I have a blog, and I’m not afraid to use it!

I did this interview in 2009 too. When I compared Annalie’s answers a couple of them were exactly the same. I guess she is my kid, so it’s not too surprising that she knows her own mind.