Monthly Archives: November 2012

Back to School / Julia Turns Eight

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As seems customary around these parts, Booksin Elementary posts its class lists on the Friday before school starts. Presumably, this strategy is designed to prevent parents from complaining about their kids’ classroom assignments by leaving them as little time as possible to mull them over. I’m not sure it works, however, judging by the amount of grousing we heard outside the school library where the class information was posted (No, it’s not posted online. That would be crazy).

Joe ended up assigned to Mrs. Glenn’s class. She was new to us (and to Booksin), but coincidentally, she’s teaching in Room 3, where Julia had kindergarten with Mrs. Romero. Unfortunately, she missed the first few weeks of class while she recovered from hip surgery that was performed over the summer. Thanks to silly insurance company rules, she couldn’t even come to campus during the day while kids were present until she was off disability. She’s back now, and she and Joe seem to be getting along famously, though she’s asked him to sit at the back of the class since he has a propensity to stand while he’s doing work.

Julia ended up in Mr. Alderette’s class. We heard through the grapevine that he was a bit strict (see the bit above about grousing), but so far, he and Julia have clicked well. In fact, he’s unlocked the heretofore unknown secret to motivating her: stuffed animals. He’s been giving out Beanie Babies—rechristened in this context as Brainy Babies—as rewards for completing online math lessons. So far, Julia has accumulated close to a dozen of these, and is in real danger of being squeezed out of her own bed.

We’ve posted a few pictures from the first couple months of the year, including a few from the time the kids in Joe’s class got a visit from SJ Sharkie, the San José Sharks’ mascot, to commemorate their participation in the Reading is Cool program, a monthly contest in which they track the number of pages they’ve read and the top reader in the class gets a medal at the end of the month. Joe was the winner the first month, so he got a prize from Sharkie; Mrs. Glenn was kind enough to give us a heads-up a week or so in advance, and Julie was able to be there to capture the occasion on video.

To me, the most notable thing about the clip is the fact that Julia would have been completely and utterly unable to handle it, as she’s still possessed by an unmanageable fear of mascots.

Of course, with the start of the school year comes Julia’s birthday. Grandma Flack was in town this year to help us celebrate, and we took the kids out to Benihana for a treat before opening presents at home. Naturally, there are photos. Apologies, though, for the noisy quality of some of the pictures: we’re still relying on our phones as cameras most of the time, and they didn’t do very well in the low-light conditions of our living room this time around.

Summer 2012 – Video

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In the wake of last week’s batch of pictures from the summer, we’ve put together a short video covering the same timeframe.

Julie also reminded me of an anecdote I forgot to mention last time. In the registration paperwork for Julia’s week at Camp Campbell, there was a section in which Julia could express her preferences and tastes on a number of subjects. One question asked what kind of counselor she would like. Characteristically, Julia wrote, “I would like a counselor who is not too strict.”

As the girls were unpacking after our arrival at camp, the counselors chatted amiably with everyone, trying to put the campers and their parents at ease. They asked Julia what she had put down on the form, and when she answered—a bit sheepishly—they knew exactly who she was. Julia can make an impression even before she makes an appearance.

Summer 2012

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Summer ended three months ago, and we finally have the pictures to show for it.

The kids spent most of the summer in a variety of different week-long camps run by the local YMCA: Lego Robotics, Delicious Science and Cooking, Swimming, etc. However, the big one, for Julia at least, was Camp Campbell: an actual overnight camp. Camp Campbell is where Joe and I camped with the Adventure Guides last spring, so we’d been looking for an opportunity to give Julia a chance to try it as well (though Julia ended up sleeping in much nicer accommodations than Joe and I had). The Y offers a shortened, three-day session for younger kids, and we timed it so that Julia could go at the same time as Phoebe and Zoe Dueltgen, two of her oldest friends. Somehow, Julia, her cabin-mates, the counsellors and the campground all emerged more or less unscathed, and Julia is looking forward to going back for a full week next year.

Toward the end of July—more or less the end of summer as well, because of the way the school year is set up—we traveled to Chicago to visit family and experience humidity. We succeeded in accomplishing the former goal, but utterly failed in the latter: the Chicago area (as well as much of the midwest) spent the year in the throes of a punishing drought. It was drier there—and the grass deader—than I ever remember it being.

The heat didn’t deter the kids, of course. My Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack graciously invited us over to their place to celebrate my cousin Caitlin’s 18th birthday and to swim in their pool. Julia was happy to show off the progress she’d made at swim camp over the summer, but Joe was still not 100% comfortable in the water, as the photos show.

We also made a trip to Donley’s Wild West Town, out in Union, Illinois. Donley’s has been around since 1974, but somehow it escaped our attention until this year; thus, it was new to all of us. It’s a quaint little amusement park with a few low-key rides, games and activities, pony rides and an action-packed Wild West Show that runs thrice daily.

Julia and Joe had a great time at the park, though Julia had a bit of a run-in with a fractious pair of ponies. She was the first person to line up for a pony ride in the morning, and the first pony she rode on got a little antsy toward the end of the ride. And by “antsy” I mean that the pony actively tried to throw her. To her credit, Julia was calm and collected (or merely paralyzed with fear) throughout. She even hung around to give it another shot on a different pony after Joe took his turn, but that pony also decided that it wasn’t particularly interested in carrying her—so maybe it was Julia after all. In any event, it appears that we don’t have to worry about shelling out for lessons in equestrianism any time soon.

Joe’s favorite activity at Donley’s, by far, was the canoe ride, in which riders float slowly around a circuit filled with suspiciously blue water, propelled by a current generated by unseen forces. Given a chance, Joe would likely have ridden the canoes all day long: it’s an open question as to whether he would have succumbed to sunstroke before poisoning himself by dragging his hands in the unnaturally azure waters and sucking his thumb.

Naturally, we visited my grandparents while we were in town. We were lucky to be there at the same time as my cousin Leslie, whom I hadn’t seen in many years—a bit ironically, as she lives closer to us than any of my other relatives, in Orangevale, California. In looking at the pictures from this part of the trip, you may notice that one appears to have been very heavily processed. This wasn’t an effort on my part to show off my artistic sensibilities; rather, it was the one shot that caught everyone with somewhat reasonable facial expressions, and it came out of the camera very underexposed. I did my best to salvage it with my limited skills.

There is one other photo for which I took a pretty aggressive approach to editing, but I’ll leave that one for you to identify.

On the subject of photographing uncooperative subjects, the last sequence of pictures in the set was taken by my mother on the deck in our backyard in a somewhat futile effort to get a standard, nice portrait of both kids together. I’m not sure any of them really qualify by that measure, but taken as a whole, I felt they captured the essence of the kids’ personalities and their relationship, at least on that particular day.

Captain America vs. The Candy Corn Witch

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Julia and Joseph have declared Halloween their second-favorite holiday after, of course, Christmas. Their love for holidays seems to be proportional to the total mass of the the stuff they receive in observance of the date. By this metric, Flag Day seems to be a big loser: school is usually out by the time mid-June rolls around, so they don’t even get cookies at a class party.

This year, the kids decided they had to get their pumpkin at the pop-up pumpkin “patch” in the parking lot of the light-rail station near our house. I tried in vain to convince them of the advantages of some of the more authentic alternatives—corn mazes, bunnies, working trains, etc.—but they were unmoved. The allure of the giant, inflatable shark slide they saw from the car was too much to resist.

Incidentally, the night before our trip to the pumpkin lot, we had dinner at the very same parking facility. There’s a local company, Moveable Feast, that brings together food trucks from around the area on nights and weekends. Joe, Julia and I had pretty traditional food truck fare: burritos and hot dogs. Julie, on the other hand, went all-out with a bacon cheeseburger that featured two halves of a glazed donut in place of a bun. It was a welcome change of pace—there were a ton of interesting options—and a unique experience (not to mention a convenient way for the food truck operators to make a bit of extra money outside their normal peak hours). Julie has almost fully recovered.

We picked up the pumpkin on Saturday, but didn’t get a chance to carve it until Wednesday afternoon, the day of Halloween. Julia was working on her Pitcher Pressure book report all day Sunday, and the kids were tied up with activities and errands Monday and Tuesday. With Spanish class, soccer practice and Julia’s science class, their days are far more fully booked than I remember mine being when I was either of their ages.

Scheduling concerns aside, the pumpkin did get carved, and the kids were ready for trick-or-treating by the time I made it home Wednesday night. Joe had planned to go as Spider-Man right up to the day the kids and Julie went shopping, when he changed his mind and decided he wanted to be Captain America. Julia originally thought she would re-use her Spider-Girl costume from last year, which would have conveniently allowed us to save a bit of money. Naturally, that impulse didn’t last—it never stood a chance, really—and she decided she would make up her mind at the costume store. Were she like me, this would have had the makings of a colossal disaster, but Julia found her outfit at the very first shop they visited. She elected to go as a candy corn witch, complete with a candy corn hat and a candy corn shirt. Julie even took her to get her nails done in the familiar candy corn pattern, an excursion which kept her out late on a school night, but everyone seems to have survived.

We have pictures, of course. There’s not much time to dwell on Halloween for now: the Toys ’R Us holiday catalog came in the mail yesterday, and the kids are busily circling the items they’d like Santa to bring for Christmas.