While cleaning up the pictures from the last set we posted, I noticed that there were a very few photos from spring and summer 2013 that never made it into an actual album. Some of them seemed like keepers—including Julia’s brave attempt at pitching in a softball game and Joe’s initial, valiant struggles with riding his bike without training wheels—so it seemed a shame to let them languish unseen on our computer. Hence, a very small album: Extra Summer Fun. Most of the shots of Joe’s cycling adventures are in the form of video clips, so they’ll have to wait for another time.

The older kids have wrapped up their first marking period at school and have settled into a reasonable rhythm, a few hiccups notwithstanding. Julia has signed up for, among other things: a role in the fall play, The Somewhat True Tale of Robin Hood; the Girls Who Code club; and a spot on the school’s ComedySportz team, which is a thing I didn’t know existed. She’s also really enjoying her journalism class thus far, particularly the photographic side of the subject. She’s headed to the National High School Journalism Convention in Chicago at the beginning of next month, and she’s predictably very excited about the trip. Unfortunately, Grandma and Grandpa Wong will have migrated down to Texas by the time she gets there, but she’s still happy to be visiting a city with which she has a passing familiarity.

Joe has been less interested in extracurriculars so far, but he does seem to be free of much of the drama that he was wrapped up in last year; sometimes a change of scenery is just what the doctor ordered. Maybe next year we can talk him into being more of a joiner.

We are continuing to move forward at a glacial pace with our plans to remodel the house. It’s par for the course for the Bay Area, but the numbers being thrown around are staggering. Of course, it doesn’t help that, true to form, our timing is terrible. But nevertheless, we persist.

We’ve decided to go ahead and work through the formal planning permit process so that we can squeeze in a few extra square feet of living space beyond what would normally be allowed by the planning department. Hopefully we can get by with a simple administrative review, rather than a public hearing: I’m not particularly excited about the prospect of giving our neighbors, kind as they are, oversight over what we do with the house, especially given that we are only looking for a slight deviation from the normal requirements: about 80 square feet, all in the back of the house, invisible from the street.

We’ve re-engaged our architect and are in active discussions with a few different builders, so we should have more tangible progress soon.

Gallery: Extra Summer Fun