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?