It’s been a busy couple weeks here in San José since our last post: the kids did their annual school walkathon; Julia has started doing Girl Scouts in earnest once again; Joe has been practicing his clarinet like crazy in the hope of being promoted to advanced band; both of the older kids and Julie came down with head lice; and I’m trying a new brand of shampoo, because the kind I’ve been using for the last thirty–odd years has been found to cause cancer.

It was Julia’s sixth and final walkathon, and rather than go all-out in an effort to finally hit the 25-mile award level, she decided to take it a little bit easy and enjoy her last time around the track with her friends. Of course, many of her friends were going all-out, but Julia cruised to the 15-mile level and called it a day.

Joe made it all the way to 20 miles (including the 5-mile bonus for playing soccer during the day), albeit with a little extra urging from yours truly. He was ready to stop after about 17 miles—his feet hurt, which was unsurprising considering his gym shoes were falling apart—but he changed back into his soccer cleats and kept going, at least as long as William and I kept him company. He got a snazzy stainless steel water bottle for his trouble; I feel like should have earned some kind of prize for carrying William around for at least half of that distance, but alas, my only reward was a very deep sleep Saturday night.

We’re unsure where the kids picked up lice, but we suspect it may have arrived in our little home on the head of William’s babysitter’s son. Regardless of how the little bugs got here, it was probably our turn: lice have been running rampant through the classrooms at Booksin for at least the last five years. Things have been bad enough that the kids have been urged to bring their own headphones to use in the computer labs. Somehow William and I have avoided the scourge thus far, though dealing with the treatment process (hours and hours of repetitive combing) has been no walk in the park. Julia was especially disappointed, because her infestation resulted in her missing her first-ever day of school.

With head lice hopefully behind us, Julia has joined a new Girl Scout troop and is diving headfirst into earning badges. This weekend, she worked on her basic cooking badge, which involved creating two delicious meals: for brunch this morning, she made chocolate chip pancakes with bacon and apple slices; and for dinner, she made a Nebraskan staple, runzas. Sometime in the next couple weeks, I’m on the hook to help her with the digital photography badge: we are supposed to spend a few hours reading and watching videos about photography online. Given my paucity of knowledge and skill, I’ll probably learn nearly as much as she does.

As alluded to by the title of this update, the kids’ school pictures came in this week, and we’ve updated their albums. Julia’s turned out very nicely, as did Joe’s, with the caveat that he had a pretty nasty case of dry, irritated skin around his nose and mouth on picture day: he had a cold that week, and had spent the previous several days fighting a running nose and licking his lips. In a very rare move for me, I’ve actually retouched his picture a bit, because the original was physically painful to look at.

We’ve also updated William’s vital statistics from his one-year checkup last month. He’s tracking around the 75^th percentile for height and the 55^th percentile for weight, so he’s a healthy, growing boy. We’re still waiting on a definitive first word, though.

In uploading this year’s portraits, I noticed that we never added last year’s class photos. I’m not sure what happened there, and will do some digging to see if they turn up.