I love Starbucks’s kid-sized drinks. They’re reasonably priced and are never too hot to drink right away. What I don’t like is that their cardboard sleeves are too big for the kid drinks, and of course Annalie always wants a sleeve for her cup. I usually wrap a napkin around the cup and put the sleeve over that, which sort of works, but it’s far from perfect.

I’ve been meaning to crochet a cup sleeve for Annalie forever, to keep in my purse along with the cloth cup sleeve I bought from BeachMama ages ago. Tonight, I finally did. The pink one on the left is for Annalie. Guess who the green one is for?

p.s. You all heard that Chuck is coming back sooner than expected, right? The premiere is Sunday, January 10th with two hour-long shows, then another show on Monday the 11th in the regular timeslot. Woohoo!

This past Monday morning I was in the kitchen doing dishes and Annalie was playing in the front yard when she saw a piece of orange paper slide underneath the front gate. She brought it inside to me so I could tell her what it was. I was dismayed to see that it was a notice from the city that our water was going to be shut off from 8am to 6pm the next day due to work being done in our neighborhood.

Having one’s water shut off for an entire day is never convenient. It’s even less so when you have company staying with you. Brenda and Bug were on their way to our house even as I read the notice, and we had planned Tuesday as a hanging-out-at-home day, with some cleaning and organizing before the vanilla party on Wednesday and a bunch of crafting Brenda wanted to get done. But we thought those things would be kinda hard to do without water on tap, not to mention how many times preschoolers and coffee-drinking moms need to use the toilet during a 10-hour span. We decided it was a good day to visit Sunny Jim Cave instead.

Photo taken by Brenda Ponnay

When we lived here in the late 90s we went to La Jolla Shores beach all the time, and we always meant to go see Sunny Jim Cave right next door to that beach, but we never quite got around to it. A good friend of Brenda’s used to live in La Jolla, so she used to hang out there quite a bit, but she hadn’t been to the cave in years. And Annalie and Bug had never been there, of course. It was decided: we were off on an adventure!

Parking around the beach in La Jolla is always crazy, apparently even in the middle of a weekday in November. We parked by Children’s Pool Beach and walked from there. It was about a half-mile along the footpath at the top of the cliff and through Ellen Browning Scripps Park, where we passed a large gathering of scuba divers just getting out of their gear and stripping off their wetsuits.

Along the way we spotted hundreds of pelicans, seagulls, and what I think were cormorants; and many, many harbor seals swimming in the water and sunning themselves on large rocks near the shore. Children’s Pool Beach isn’t really much of a swimming spot anymore, in fact, because of all the harbor seals who live in the area and contaminate the water with their waste. But they sure are fun to watch.

Photo taken by Brenda Ponnay

At the cave store we paid the entrance fees, and headed towards the stairs. We paused at the entrance to read the sign proclaiming that the stairs had been there for 100 years, and they were perfectly safe…but that anyone who chose to climb down the 145 stairs did so at their own risk.

Photo on left taken by Brenda Ponnay

As soon as we entered the tunnel that had been carved out of the cliff, the air was noticeably cooler. Walking all the way down didn’t take us very long, even though Annalie was slightly creeped out towards the bottom by the wetness of the walls and the stairs, and Bug usual pace might be called snail-like. There were pigeons flying around in the cave, and graffiti all along the wooden rails of the deck, and there was the cave opening in the vague shape of a man’s profile, and the blue water and blue sky beyond. We made it!

Photos taken by Brenda Ponnay

Annalie and Bug looked around for about two minutes and then…they were ready to go. It’s not like there were any rocks to climb on or anything, just a wooden deck and a hole for viewing the ocean. Not a big freaking deal to kids who live in beach towns, I guess! We headed back to the tunnel to make the 145-stair climb.

Annalie and Bug counted their steps as we went up. We didn’t start counting till around the 30th step, but Annalie kept on counting all the way to the top, which she reached a good 30 seconds before I did, and—since Bug insisted on climbing every step herself—a good two minutes before Brenda and Bug did.

Two minutes might not sound like long to you or me, but I suppose to a kid that might feel like an eternity. The picture on the left is the face Annalie was making as she told me she was boooored and ready to gohhhh. But as soon as I said, “Could you please smile for me, just for a second?” she willingly obliged.

It’s a good thing the walk back to the car was mostly downhill, because Annalie declared that her feet were too tired to walk, and I ended up giving her a piggyback ride much of the way. I think Brenda had to carry Bug some of the way too, so we were glad to stop and take a quick break in one of the gazebos that overlook the beach. Brenda took these awesome shots of me and the kids there. I especially like the one of me and Bug. For some reason, we don’t get in a lot of photos with each other’s kids. We should try to do that more.

By the time we left La Jolla, ate lunch, and stopped at Starbucks for an afternoon caffeine jolt it was only two o’clock, which meant another four hours to kill before they turned the water back on. But we had another destination up our sleeves to fill the afternoon…

…which you can easily figure out if you look at my Flickr stream, a certain photoset in particular.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which I may write after I write about the vanilla-making party Brenda and I had with Sue, Heather, Bonnie, Jen (but not Sonja, *sniff*), and assorted children. Or maybe I’ll write Part 2 first! You just never know with me.

When Heather arrived at my house today for the vanilla-making party (more on that soon) she was wearing the exact same brown Target t-shirt and dark-rinse blue jeans that I happened to be wearing. It was pretty funny.

This is the only bite of doughnut Annalie ate. Then she put the doughnut down, jumped off the lower ledge of the lifeguard tower, and ran off to play in the sand.

It had been a long while since we’d had the chance for breakfast on the beach with Brenda and Bug. I’m so glad we got the chance to do it last weekend. I was having one of those nonspecific cruddy days and driving to the beach to visit with friends was just what I needed. Even though I forgot my laptop power cord there when I came back home.

It was such a beautiful morning for the beach. The sky was bluer than blue, the water was sparkling, and the sun was shining, making the sprinkles on our doughnuts seem to glow in Technicolor. (Don’t you want a doughnut now?)

I had fun playing with my new telephoto lens. It’s pretty freaking cool.

We stayed for quite a while, letting the kids dig and hunt for shells and build sandcastles. I managed to convince Annalie that she needed to stay out of the water, that in November the water was just too cold for playing in.

Well, uh. I convinced her for a while. Eventually the waves’ siren song was too much for her to resist. She ran out to meet the waves as they splashed up around her ankles, then ran laughing back up the sand.

Eventually there was a big wave that soaked her leggings and the bottom part of her dress. She was good about staying where the water was shallow, but it’s the ocean. If you’re gonna stand in the splash zone, chances are you’re gonna get pretty wet. Annalie was not bothered by this at all, of course.

Bug wasn’t interested in the water. She was content to build sandcastles and make faces and do balancing tricks and jumps for the camera and play spinning games with her mom.

Brenda snapped this shot of me that I quite like, despite the fact that it’s of my booty. I wandered down close to the water as I chatted with my mom on my cell phone. I called her to ask her if it was cold in Nebraska, then mentioned that it was sunny and warm and a beautiful day at the beach, couldn’t she hear the surf? Yeah, I can be a brat sometimes. But my mom loves me anyway.

When it was time to walk the handful of blocks back to Brenda’s house, Annalie and Bug both wanted to ride in the stroller. Our solution was to have Annalie climb in first, and have Bug sit in her lap. I thought Annalie would last only a couple of minutes before she was uncomfortable enough to walk.

Annalie did say, “Ow,” a few times. Each time I asked if she wanted to get out of the stroller, and she shook her head no every time, then closed her eyes again. I guess all that castle-building and wave-rushing wore her out.

(In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I have my laptop power cord back now, thanks to Brenda bringing it down here to me.)

Annalie and I had tons of fun visiting Brenda and Bug this weekend. I have many photos on my hard drive of us all having fun, but I can’t edit and upload them yet because I forgot my laptop’s power cord at Brenda’s house, 90 miles away. I’m trying to make the battery last so I can at least check email till I can get the cord back. I might not be online much in the next few days, but I should get lots of crocheting done and sleep more!

A month or so ago, I wrote about how I was going batty trying to figure out a pattern for my not-yet-born niece’s blanket. You might remember that I was crocheting lots of little things just to give me a break from rearranging skeins of yarn on the floor and frogging my test squares. I blogged about the cupcakes and headbands and baby bottles I had made, but I didn’t blog about everything I’d been crocheting, because some of the things I’d made were gifts, and I didn’t want to spoil anyone’s surpise.

I crocheted this adorable little alien dude for Kuky’s baby boy Nathan, based on this free amigurumi alien pattern (registration required) from Lion Brand Yarn. The cupcake was a big-sister gift for Kuky’s daughter Isabelle. Like the other cupcakes I’ve crocheted, it’s based on a free cupcake pattern from BitterSweet.

Annalie saw the alien I was making for Nathan, and was very sad when I told her it wasn’t for her. So I crocheted one for her one too. Annalie named her alien “Prettiest.”

Another crocheted baby bottle. I…made this so long ago that I can’t remember if I started it at the bottom or top. I know I did one with the first one, and then I tried it the other way with this second bottle, and I liked the second way better. I can’t remember which was which, though.

I had to send a little care package to Anna after her visit here, because a piece of her stroller fell off in my van. I stuck in these balls that I crocheted for her kids. Annalie chose the colors especially for Apple and J.

These stripey crocheted balls were a gift for my friend Mike’s two boys, to include in a package I was sending to their family. Mike, whom I know from 7 Days, is the one who described the show Chuck to me as "Get Smart meets The Hunt for Red October," which convinced me I needed to watch it immediately. The rest is history. To thank him, I wanted to paint him a mug. He suggested I paint one for his wife, too, so I did.

Mike’s mug, on the right, has a Casey quote on it ("I don’t kid about quiche"). His wife’s mug, on the left, has a less direct Chuck reference. The first line in the Cake song "Short Skirt, Long Jacket" is "I want a girl with a mind like a diamond." An instrumental version of that song is used over the credits of "Chuck." Mostly I just really like that line, and knowing Mike I suspect that it describes his wife pretty well. (There is a photo in Mike’s flickr of him and his wife posing with their mugs in the last run of 7 Days, too.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work on the blanket I’m crocheting for my niece.

Today was a good day. Annalie and I hung out at home in our jammies most of the morning. We had peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for lunch. After lunch, Annalie spent almost an hour telling me an elaborate story about how she was born in Mexico but her parents couldn’t take care of her so she had to live at a children’s helping place and then we adopted her, but not before her abuela taught her how to cook a soup with carrots…only they aren’t really carrots, they’re yellow onions and they have to be cut up very small. That last part she told me while she was using a paring knife to chop up five or six baby carrots into 1/4-inch pieces, which she then put in a bowl and snacked on while she watched The Electric Company.

We ran some errands, including the pottery studio, where I was just going to pick up a couple of mugs to paint later. But while we were there, Annalie said she wanted to paint something. Usually I’m lucky if she’ll paint for ten minutes, and then I’ll try to distract her with snacks for another half-hour before giving up and coming back another day to finish my project. Today I was able to almost finish both mugs (and would have completely finished them except I didn’t have information I needed to write something on the bottom of the mugs). Annalie knew exactly what she wanted to do, and spent 45 minutes painting one thing, then almost as long painting a second item. I offered to wrap my mugs up and take her home when she was done, but she said, “No, that’s okay. I’ll color with markers till you’re done.” And that was on top of earlier today when she was going downstairs for some reason, and she turned back and said, “Can I get you a snack while I’m downstairs? Or a Diet Coke maybe?”

As some commenters noted on my last post, 5 1/2 is just one of those ages where there’s a lot of questioning and challenging going on with most kids. And Annalie certainly does miss her daddy. We talk about Troy all the time and pray for him every night. We take a photo for him every day, and she’s always drawing him pictures or typing him emails. Goodness knows that when I am having a bad day, I’m often thinking Waaah, I want Troy! so it makes perfect sense that she’d be thinking the same thing when she’s having a bad day.

I’m sure we’ll have plenty more time-outs and talks about anger and not letting your temper get the better of you, but for now things are back to normal. Maybe even a little better than normal.

*Troy asked me what the title of this post meant, since it seemed like the day I wrote about had been a pretty good day. It’s actually a line of the song “Bad Day” from Barenaked Ladies’ album SNACKTIME!, the one they wrote with kids in mind. You can find the lyrics and play the song here.

We’ve had a rather rough few days around here. It hasn’t been all bad, we’ve had plenty of storytelling and tickling and other pleasant interactions. But we’ve also had way more than our usual share of time-outs and dicussions about why it’s not okay to disobey your mother, or to speak rudely, or to throw books, or to hit. We’ve talked about how it’s okay to be angry, it’s okay to say, “I’m really angry about this,” but it’s not okay to lose your temper and take your anger out on the people around you.

I don’t think there’s any particular reason Annalie has been testing limits lately. She’s been eating and sleeping normally. Our routine is settling back down after travels and houseguests and sickness, so that’s probably part of it. I think it’s mostly just one of those things that kids do from time to time, checking to see if all the rules are still the same. Or maybe God thought I hadn’t been challenged enough lately. Who knows.

In any case, today was Annalie’s half-birthday—that is, the day she turned 5 1/2. My piano teacher’s family used to celebrate half-birthdays with half a cake, just for fun. Troy and I have celebrated each other’s half-birthdays a few times over the years (mine is 9/11, which has a whole new meaning the past eight years), when we’ve been apart on our actual birthdays. Today I decided to surprise Annalie with a half-cake because I thought we could use a fun surprise.

I tried to be sneaky about it. When I was in the kitchen cleaning up and Annalie was upstairs drawing and watching Cyberchase, I whipped up a small one-layer lemon cake as quietly as I could. I didn’t use my big stand mixer because I figured Annalie might hear it. While it was baking, I went back upstairs and played a game of UNO with Annalie, then went back downstairs to take out the trash and recycling, and take the cake out of the oven and make some frosting.

I discovered I could not make the frosting without using the stand mixer. Sure enough, within two seconds of turning it on, I heard Annalie jump off the couch and come clattering downstairs. I flicked the mixer off, met Annalie in the kitchen doorway and said, “You can’t come in! It’s a surprise for you and it’s not ready yet.”

Annalie grinned and asked, “Is it cake? It smells like lemon cake!”

“It’s a surprise, that’s all I’m saying. Can you please stay upstairs for a few more minutes? And not try to sneak into the kitchen? I really want it to be a fun surprise,” I answered.

Annalie, still grinning, replied, “Okay, Mama! I won’t try to sneak down, I promise.” Then, true to her word, she went back upstairs and stayed put till I was done assembling and frosting the cake. I was quite proud of her for that.

When I went upstairs to tell her she could come down and see her surprise, she fairly flew down the stairs, then giggled with delight when she saw the cake. I asked her if she knew why I made her half a cake. She didn’t, so I told her that today was her half-birthday, that today she was officially 5 1/2 years old. She laughed, then ran to get plates and forks.

We put candles in the cake, I sang to her, we took a photo for Troy, and she blew out her candles. We had tall glasses of milk and lemon cake with lemon cream cheese frosting for dinner. Annalie smiled and chattered nonstop the whole time, and gave me about 17 hugs and kisses while we were eating and talking about the fact that now she’s closer to being six than she is to five.

After dinner we turned on the Christmas lights still strung on our house and in the lemon tree, and went outside to play a game Annalie invented, called “Look, Gramaw sent me a care package!” Annalie put a bunch of stuffed animals and her Halloween candy in a big box, wrote “Gramaw” for the return address and scribbled fake cursive lines for the delivery address, and set it outside the sliding glass door. Then we came inside and went back outside, pretending to be surprised by the big box on the patio. Annalie spent a good 15 minutes exclaiming over the box’s contents and naming each of her “new” stuffed animals. She put the candy back in her Halloween pumpkin, saying she didn’t want any candy right then, since she’d just eaten cake. Very sensible of her, I thought.

Right before bedtime, Annalie almost lost it because she wanted to take a shower upstairs, not downstairs. I’d already switched from a bath to a shower because she insisted that she’d told me she wanted a shower (even though she had told me she wanted a bath), and didn’t feel like switching bathrooms. I told her that she could have a shower upstairs tomorrow, but tonight we were staying downstairs. Oh, the drama. Then she yelled at me because I grabbed the wrong cupcake pajamas from her dresser, she wanted the shorts ones, not the stupid long pants ones! Cue me counting to ten under my breath and saying a prayer for patience.

Compared to the defiance I’ve been dealing with in the past few days, this evening was actually pretty mild. I stayed calm and offered Annalie the choice between downstairs shower or going to bed early, and she backed down, grumbling, and even offered an apology for yelling at me. After her shower we were talking about the fact that when a grown-up says, “This is what we’re doing,” it’s not okay for a kid to yell just because they don’t like what the grown-up said. I asked Annalie why she thought she’d been having so much trouble controlling her temper the last few days, and she shook her head and said, “I just don’t know, Mom! It’s a mystery.”

Maybe it’s just because she’s 5 1/2 now. Life does get more complicated as you get older. I won’t make the mistake of thinking that a 5 1/2-year-old can’t be troubled or worried. I remember being 5 1/2, and in my experience childhood was not all gumdrops and roses. I guess all Troy and I can do is love her, teach her, guide her, give her as much freedom as we safely can, and surprise her with the occasional half-birthday cake.

Woohoo! We’ve made it through 100 days without Troy, and Troy’s made it through 100 days of deployment. I know, we should have made a fuss over Day 90 because that’s allegedly the halfway point, but Troy’s homecoming date is up in the air, so who knows.

It seemed right to make a fuss about 100 days, though, because, c’mon, A HUNDRED DAYS! Look at all those photos. We’ve actually managed to take a picture every day, more or less. I only had to fudge once.

Here’s to 100 days down!

View the photoset 180 photos for Troy on Flickr, or view the mosaic large.

There are some really nice people on the internet. Kimberly from Tokyo Pen Shop saw that I mentioned buying pens from them in my last post, and she also saw my friend Bekah’s comment that she would love to try the pens but wasn’t that keen on paying shipping, and left a comment herself with a free shipping code for my readers! So now’s your chance, if you want to try the pens I mentioned (or you want to buy a Christmas gift for the pen-lover in your life) just enter the code ACTUALLYFREESHIPPING when you check out. The code expires November 14th, 2009.

On behalf of me and my readers, thanks, Kimberly!