Seeing as I’m going to have a lot of time on my hands all of a sudden, it seems like an opportune time to get caught up on some pictures. So, off we go.

First, Julia’s spring school portrait came in, and you can find it in her class picture album. The spring portraits are taken in front of a green screen—the school didn’t actually haul the kids out to a woodland stream for the photo shoot—so we can provide alternate versions with different, equally unlikely, backgrounds if you like.

You might notice that there’s no corresponding spring portrait for Joe. As it turns out, when his teacher, Mrs. Glenn, asked the kids who were scheduled to have their pictures taken to line up, he misunderstood and, well, didn’t. He was very apologetic when he came home, thinking that Julie and I would be upset. Secretly, however, I was probably just as happy to get the check we’d written back un-cashed, especially in light of recent developments.

There’s also an entirely new album, covering various events of this spring and Joe’s seventh birthday. Quite a bit has happened over the last few months: Julia had braces put in and played the trumpet in the inaugural Booksin band—there are pictures of the end-of-year concert in the album. Of course, Julia privately admitted that sometimes she doesn’t bother pressing the buttons on her trumpet as she’s playing, but she’s performed Hot Cross Buns at home and sounded a lot better than I would.

We let Joe choose where we went out to eat to celebrate his birthday, and he chose to go back to Benihana, where we took Julia last year. Unfortunately for Joe, because his birthday was on a Monday night—and the night of the band concert—we actually went out the night before and saved cake and presents for after the show.

Both kids survived the 2012–2013 school year and are headed into summer camp starting next week; in spite of my recent change of employment status, we decided to leave them signed up for camp for the time being in order to minimize the amount of disruption they perceive. We’ll re-evaluate as the situation evolves.

Joe had a great year, though he did manage to force a second consecutive teacher into retirement. All told, three of the six teachers Julia and Joe have had at Booksin have retired immediately after having our kids in their classes. Mrs. Glenn was fantastic, however, and Joe thoroughly enjoyed first grade; he ended up being the class champion for the “Reading is Cool” program, which counts the number of pages the kids read at home during the school year. His handwriting, on the other hand, is pretty atrocious, much as mine was at his age. Julie has vowed that he’s going to spend a fair portion of the summer practicing.

Julia had a very Julia year. She continued to excel academically: she was one of only two students in Mr. Alderette’s class to finish the online math drills the school makes available, and she is reading well above her ostensible grade level. Her favorite after-school activity by far has been the GATE science program, a fact that brings a smile to this IMSA alumnus’s face.

On the other hand, Julia has continued to demonstrate her spirited nature in the classroom and at home. As well as she’s done in school, her greatest achievements have come in the realm of sheer cussedness. At one point, Mr. Alderette was actually sending home weekly progress reports on the level of disruption Julia was causing in class. Things seem to have come under control by the end of the year, but we’ll see when we review the kids’ report cards.

The aforementioned computerized math program, IXL, provides another amusing—if only in hindsight—example. Julie really, really wanted Julia to complete the third-grade sequence by the end of the year. Julia, for her part, was less driven to finish, but for the fact that Mr. Alderette would occasionally set up challenges in which the kids would receive Beanie Babies, which he called Brainy Babies, for finishing a certain number of lessons. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that we didn’t really start pushing for Julia to finish until the second half of the school year—and, if we’re being honest, the latter portion of the second half of the year—so the effort was tremendously backloaded, which the majority of the work being done in April and May.

As you can imagine, this resulted in a highly combustible environment, with all parties behaving at times in ways that made none of us proud. I honestly feel that actually getting Julia to sit still, concentrate and double-check her work was more effort than the math itself. Nevertheless, she finished—aided by the fact that Julie also set out the promise of Brainy Babies—just a couple days before the end of the year. We’re left with a house full of Beanie Babies and hopefully minimal psychological damage for all concerned.

Julia herself commented on the situation in the context of a class project in which she was asked to write a letter to Fern from Charlotte’s Web. In her letter, Julia asked Fern how she felt about her frequent visits to Wilbur the pig at her uncle’s nearby barn. She then went on to explain that were she in Fern’s shoes, she would not be able to visit as often as she might like, because her mother forces her to do at least 100 hours of IXL every night.