Summer has wound down here in San José. The kids are back in school—classes started on August 14—and soccer should be starting up any day now. To celebrate, we’ve posted a set of photos covering the last few weeks of summer and the first day of school.

In the set, you’ll find some pictures of the kids at a couple different summer reading program events run by the San José Public Library. They decided to mix things up this year by requiring kids to participate in on-site activities to win prizes. As a result, the end of July was a flurry of visits to different library branches to fulfill the program requirements. One was more or less a giant Lego party which, naturally, thrilled Joe immensely; another was a performance by Dan Chan Magic Man. Julia managed to get herself chosen as a volunteer during the latter and, somewhat predictably, was a ham on onstage. She’s a fascinating bundle of contradictions: one day she’s spontaneously clowning around for an audience of strangers, and the next she’s refusing to give her well-rehearsed book report in front of a classroom full of friends.

As usual, we learned of the kids’ classroom assignments a couple days before the start of the school year. Julia is in Mrs. Whittell’s class, which is in the newer wing of the school, near the library. She switches over to Mrs. Compton-Kolda’s class next door for science and non-fiction reading; I’m not sure what the actual rationale for this approach is, but if nothing else, it’s an early preview of middle school for the kids. She’s quite excited to have a Trapper Keeper this year; I was surprised to learn that they still made them.

Joe gets two teachers this year: Mrs. Olson is teaching his class Monday through Thursday, and Mrs. Vandeneynde is covering Fridays. Luckily for both teachers, the school has wisely elected to continue avoiding putting Joe and his buddy Mason in the same classroom. That said, he still has a number of friends from kindergarten and first grade in his class this year.

As of this writing, we’re just about a month out from Julie’s expected due date, and we’re continuing to make slow progress on preparing for the baby’s arrival. Julie’s office gave her a new car seat and stroller, and we’re working on unloading the old stroller on Craigslist to make room in our packed garage. My jobs this weekend are to install the car seat in the van and see if I can figure out how to reattach the drop side on Joe’s old crib. We’re also planning to rearrange the furniture in Julia’s room a bit to accommodate the crib and a changing table, but Julia hasn’t signed off on that plan yet. I’m sure that will be an interesting conversation.

It’s a good thing that we still have a month to get ready, because Julie has been feeling pretty under the weather lately. She picked up a cold from Joe a couple of weeks ago—he has an unfortunate habit of drinking out of her water glass throughout the day—and the nagging cough that resulted developed into bronchitis. That’s being treated with an inhaler and antibiotics, but late Tuesday night, just after taking the antibiotics for the first time, she started feeling a sharp pain in her side and back. Fearing that she or the baby might be having an adverse reaction to the medication, she dashed off to the emergency room. The verdict: kidney stones.

She came home with a prescription for some nice, strong painkillers that made it dangerous for her to drive, so I took off from work early on Wednesday to pick up the kids from school. Then, on Friday, she suffered another attack, and this time the pain medication didn’t help. A trip to the urgent care clinic followed, where she was given an injection that again left her unable to drive. I left work early once more to pick her up from the doctor’s office—I actually had to sign discharge papers promising not to let her operate heavy equipment—and Tammy Riggioni, the mother of one of Joe’s friends, picked them up at school.

Fortunately, this was Julie’s last full week at work, so we’re hopeful she’ll have an opportunity to rest and recuperate in the coming weeks.

On a more positive note, Joe has suddenly decided to take giving up his longstanding thumb-sucking habit more seriously. If he makes it through the weekend, it’ll have been a week, and Julie and I are now faced with the frightening prospect of making good on the various incentives we offered to get him to stop. In fact, he’s so confident that he’s going to make it that he’s begun trying to renegotiate the reward for making it through a month: whereas before he wanted Minecraft, he now decided that he really wants New Super Marios Bros. 2 (the “New” is apparently part of the name) and a Nintendo 3DS to play it on. Suffice it to say that discussions are ongoing.