Some more gratuitous photos, for no real reason

I posted some photos from our vacation to Southern California in the last post, but for no real reason, here are some more from this summer.

After a summer with lots of swimming and lots of chlorinated pools--two 2-week sessions of swim lessons in late June and late July, plus daily swimming while at our cousins' house in Anaheim and other swim outings--Anna's hair is (was) driving me totally batty. I'd pretty much given up the battle and stopped brushing her hair unless it was totally necessary, I was feeling like a glutton for punishment, or it was freshly washed. So last Friday I "forced" her to get her hair cut, to gain some sanity. I'm not a long-hair person for myself, much less a girl child, yet Anna prefers to have longer hair (aside from the tangles)…and so I frequently find myself with a daughter with far longer hair than I'd sanely choose.

But no more.

Needless to say, it was just a wee bit tangly and atrocious heading into the hairdresser's….


And mercifully, it's now much more manageable afterward. (Too bad it'll never look this sleek and chic again! ;o))




Anna will be turning seven in less than a week, and it really struck me with these photos just how much she really isn't a little girl anymore. She's not quite up to fully big-girl status yet--she bristles at "little girl" so we've decided she's a "medium girl" ;o)--but the fresh haircut and style really drove home how old she is now.

Almost seven.

Oy.

On a totally separate note, one other thrill of vacation for Anna was a very special milestone in a kid's life:

The first time she got to go to Chuck E. Cheese.

Double oy.

I grew up in a town that didn't have a Chuck E. Cheese, and I think the only time I'd literally ever been there was for a friend's birthday party in third grade, in the town 30 minutes away. I remember all of us invited--three of us--gave him a kite, which is still a running joke amongst us over 25 years later, and I fondly remember the ball pit. But as an adult, I'd been warned off it by friends. Crazy-busy, bad pizza, expensive (and a headache in the making). Yet Anna, of course, still knew what it was--likely because it's a sponsor of the Curious George cartoon on PBS Kids, which she frequently watches (we don't have anything beyond local TV stations, thank god), and from other friends. So when one of Charley's cousins asked her if she wanted to go, she immediately and enthusiastically picked that option, even over swimming in their pool for the day.

Fortunately, Chuck E. Cheese really wasn't all that bad, and Anna had a blast. No wonder she wants to move to SoCal: all the cool things happen there.





One other fun part of vacation in LA was getting to see one of my favorite childhood/high school/college friends, who's lived in southern California for the last 10 years…and unfortunately, it's been just over five years since we managed to see each other. We only had a small window of opportunity to see each other and get our kids together (I'd never even met his four-year-old daughter!), but we met at Downtown Disney for a quick, one-hour get-together while our kids picked out animals and clothes and we caught up.


And after they left, Anna and I grabbed an ice cream cone…and she got really messy (although these pictures really don't do it any justice). ;o)

That is one slightly deranged look on her face ;o)

And like I said, there really wasn't any purpose for this email…just pictures. ;o) (And forgive the subpar photo quality in this post; they were all taken with my ancient, decrepit iPhone 3G. =))