Category Archives: Girl Scouts

Camping, Haircuts, and Snacks – November 2015

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This post is another look back, covering a timeframe almost exactly eight years in the past: November 2015. As always, we have pictures.

This brief update highlights just how much we had going on back then. It includes Will at speech therapy and playing in the park; Joe camping out with the Y Guides; and Julia working fall sales booths selling snacks for her Girl Scout troop. The photos show her selling with no fewer than three different girls over the course of a couple weeks.

The set also includes some video of Joe taking part in competitions at a Y Guides campout at Mount Madonna. You can see how seriously he took these inconsequential games by the look of intense concentration on his face. I was also struck by how good his throwing form was in one of the clips, even if the result wasn’t what he was aiming for—watch the video, and all will be made clear.

The album wouldn’t be complete without a selection of photos of William doing William things. We have William playing with his food; William goofing off with his sibling in nothing but his diaper; William after convincing some firefighters to let him sit in their truck; and what we think is his first real haircut outside the home.

There are a few work-related photos thrown in, highlighting that year’s offsite in Napa. If I recall correctly, I dozed off in the front row of a talk in the wine cellar that looks like a bomb shelter. It wasn’t the highest point of my professional career (though, to be fair, it was a really boring talk).

Gallery: Camping, Haircuts, and Snacks

October 2015

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After a couple posts’ worth of recent pictures, today we have a set of photos from long ago: October 2015. In many ways, these pictures aren’t very different from the ones we’re taking today: like current collections, they cover school, extracurriculars, sports, and holiday celebrations. They’re eerily similar, except we’re all quite a bit older now, and the kids’ roles have changed dramatically. These echos are all the more poignant because the next set of photos I’m working on covers roughly the same time of year, but for 2023. They both feature soccer, Booksin, and trick-or-treating, but through a radically different lens. Sometimes, it’s hard to comprehend how we got from there to here.

William is omnipresent in this collection. We have pictures of him doing dishes, shopping with Julie, trick-or-treating, and—reflecting how he spent much of his time that fall—lots of photos of him playing in the park at the older kids’ soccer games. A particular favorite is a picture of him helping to collect drinks for the Booksin Walkathon.

Julia and Joe aren’t neglected, however. The gallery includes Julia’s Girl Scout troop making SWAPS to exchange with other scouts, pumpkin carving, Halloween hamminess, and numerous action shots from soccer games.

There is also a smattering of pictures from a sailing excursion on Monterey Bay that Julie set up for our anniversary. Neither of us had any previous experience sailing, and we were probably more hindrance than help to the captain of the ship who took us out, but it was a unique and fun experience that I’m grateful to have had.

Gallery: October 2015

Spring and Summer 2015

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It’s Super Bowl Sunday here in the Bay Area, and rather than fight the insane traffic it’s causing, I decided to stay in and post pictures. Actually, because we’re so far behind, posting an album is on my to-do list pretty much every weekend, but circumstances often get in the way.

This set of pictures is relatively recent, dating back to the Spring and Summer of 2015. It covers Easter (William’s first as an active participant), the spring band concert at Booksin, Joe’s ninth birthday, Julia’s fifth grade promotion ceremony, and a trip to Great America with Angelisa, one of Julia’s friends from school, which Julia won for being one of the top sellers of Girl Scout cookies last February.

The promotion ceremony was brief but poignant. I don’t remember having anything of the kind when I finished elementary school, but I’m certain I would have enjoyed it. And, mercifully, it was much more temperate than the last graduation ceremony I attended, which was in Houston in May.

The trip to Great America was the first time we’d taken the kids to a proper amusement park, and despite some initial trepidation—especially from Joe—they had a great time. Julia and Angelisa were braver than I was at their age, hitting most of the roller coasters in the park that weren’t completely insane, while Joe’s enthusiasm was a bit more tempered by a healthy fear of perishing in a catastrophic failure of the park’s safety systems.

This was my first visit to the California version of Great America, as well (though I remember seeing it from our hotel or the highway during our family’s visit way back in 1982). Having been to the larger one in Illinois many times, it was strange to see a mix of familiar and unfamiliar sites. The two parks have been completely separate entities for years, but a number of rides, like the main carousel, log ride, bumper cars, and Sky Trek tower (called the Star Tower out here) are more or less identical. The vague sense of familiarity mixed with novelty made me feel at once young and old.

Gallery: Spring and Summer 2015.

Early 2015

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We’re well into the second half of the year, so it seemed as good a time as any (other than few months ago, which I concede probably would have been better) to put up some pictures from the first few months of 2015. This set contains a trim and tidy 187 photos, down from more than 600 originals, so it’s probably a good thing that I exercised a modicum of editorial control rather than dumping the whole pile online; this way, you get slightly fewer underexposed shots of my shoes.

The first part of the album contains a number of pictures of Julia hard at work on her fifth grade science fair project, in which she measured the effect of weight on the distance traveled by a Pinewood Derby car. As I mentioned in an earlier post, she earned perfect marks for this project thanks to her hard work, some of which is very evident in the pictures. I’m not sure whether they’ll be doing science fair projects in middle school, but we’re not off the hook, regardless: as a fourth grader, it’s Joe’s turn now. Does anybody have some good project ideas?

Girl Scout activities also feature quite prominently in this collection, as Julia and Julie were both very involved in scouting this spring. The troop went geocaching in a county park—a hobby that seems to have been trivialized a bit by virtue of the fact that nearly everyone carries a phone with a built–in GPS receiver nowadays. Julia had a lot of fun, right up to the part where she tumbled down a hill and into a creek, holding onto Julie’s phone the entire time. The girls also visited the Hiller Aviation Museum, where they simulated crashing planes during takeoff, landing, and pretty much every other phase of flight; dissected bird pellets; and took part in a cleanup day at a local park.

Julia also had her braces removed this February, a much-anticipated and eagerly awaited event. She celebrated with what she and Julie termed a “candy extravaganza” and showed off some of the biggest smiles we’ve seen from her in recent years. Unfortunately, according to her orthodontist, she’s going to need some more work in a year or two once her jaw is finished growing, but we’ll worry about that when the time comes—for now, Julia is enjoying her newfound freedom to drink pop and eat gummy bears.

In other orthodontic news, Joe had an expander put in last week, so he’s been drooling profusely and making strange slurping sounds whenever food gets stuck in it for the last few days; I’m sure he’s very popular at lunchtime at school. The expander is there to correct a minor crossbite by pushing his upper teeth farther apart. Each night, we get to use a tiny allen wrench to turn a ratchet and increase the width of the device by ⅛ mm.; it’s like a tiny medieval torture device on the roof of his mouth. If all goes well, however—and he can stay on the straight and narrow with respect to his thumb–sucking habit—this may be the only intervention he needs, meaning that he won’t have to have actual braces. That would be a great outcome, but in the meantime, we’re stuck with another set of dietary restrictions

William remains adorable. He’s still not talking nearly as much as we’d like, and we’re in the process of getting him started in speech therapy on the recommendation of Dr. Kim. Or, I should say, we’re trying to get him started: the recommendation actually came in around his eighteen-month checkup, but thanks to a spectacular collision among multiple slow–moving, easily befuddled bureaucracies, we are just now getting to the point where his initial appointment is in sight. The good news is that his evaluation indicated that his comprehension is easily at or above the norm for toddlers his age, so he understands what’s going on around him. He’s just not ready to talk about it yet.

Julia turned eleven last month, and we’ll get pictures of the limited festivities up soon. This year, she got one primary (and expensive) gift: tickets to a Taylor Swift concert at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. She and Julie went to the show together and had a great time: Julia has been listening to Swift’s album, 1989 non–stop ever since.

Gallery: Early 2015.