Category Archives: Holiday

November in Black and White

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I already have more hobbies than I have time for—the majority of them get exactly zero attention, most of the time—so this fall, I thought to myself, “Why not add another?” With that mantra in mind, I decided to explore film photography. You can see the results here.

I’ve always been a little bit interested in photography, long before I had the slightest understanding how it worked. Some of my oldest memories are of my dad rearranging the lamps in our living room and fiddling with a light meter to set up for Christmas portraits. On early family vacations, I toted around an old Kodak Instamatic that took 126 film. And on later trips, I took a drugstore pocket camera that shot 110 film—I probably still have that camera in a box somewhere.

But that was pretty much it until Julie and I got married: my college and grad school years are almost completely undocumented photographically, except for visits to my parents. Before our wedding in the year 2000, I bought an Advanced Photo System (APS) camera to take on our honeymoon, thinking that would set us up for the long haul. Smart, prescient move.

That was the end of my film photography journey until this November when, on a whim, I bought a roll of Tri-X, put it into an old Canon SLR I bought on eBay a few years back (the last time this impulse hit me), and just started taking pictures. I’m not an especially skilled photographer—these shots were taken using automatic focus in aperture priority mode—but I was pleased with the results nonetheless. They’re mostly candid shots of my family and the neighborhood, subject matter that’s inherently appealing to me, and the experience left me eager to find opportunities to explore further.

Gallery: November in Black and White

A Field Trip, Thanksgiving, and Gingerbread Houses

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This update, A Field Trip, Thanksgiving, and Gingerbread Houses, covers the brief-but-busy interlude between Halloween and the start of the Christmas season. The set kicks off with a few photos of William on a field trip to the Marine Science Institute in Redwood City, or MSI, where the Booksin fourth graders were presented with the opportunity to learn about the incredible variety of marine life in the San Francisco Bay. This field trip is a longtime staple for Booksin students—more on that in an update to come—and it’s a treat to see these pictures if only because William has been on relatively few field trips in his time in school, thanks largely to Covid, which put the kibosh on class outings for a couple of years

MSI aside, William had very a busy month. In the space of eight days, he attended a bowling birthday party for his friend Henry; he went bowling again for his friend Caeden’s birthday; he learned to solve his Rubik’s cube for the first time; and he played mini golf at his friend Julian’s birthday party. His social calendar is vastly more full than mine.

Most of the gallery is taken up by pictures from the weekend of Thanksgiving. Julie’s Mom joined us for Thanksgiving dinner, of course, and the holiday meal was a resounding success. We were fortunate to have one of the best turkeys we’ve had in recent years, and we even finished the green bean casserole that day, neatly avoiding the challenge of reheating that dish without making the onions soggy. For dessert, William worked up the nerve to try pumpkin pie for the first time; as a result of his experiment, he decided that he’s a big fan of whipped cream.

That Sunday, we decorated gingerbread houses at the eleventh annual Gingerbread Decorating Party at the San José Woman’s Club. We’ve attended this event since Julia was little, and the comfortable routine is familiar and uncomplicated. The basic outlines have remained unchanged for years: you pick up your gingerbread house; put together a plate of candy and snacks with which to decorate it; and enjoy hot chocolate, apple cider, and cheese and crackers as you festoon your creation. William always looks forward to entering his house in the contest at the end of the party—he’ll win one of these years—but this year we had to duck out early due to another commitment.

The set concludes with a few snapshots from a brief ceremony UPA held to honor students who did well in the National Merit Scholarship competition. Joe was part of the largest group of honorees, the Commended Students. He was a little reluctant to attend, perhaps because he was dissatisfied with his performance on the PSAT, but he was ultimately convinced to go, which gave him an opportunity to goof off with his friend Caitlin, who was also recognized that evening.

Finally, I snuck in a picture of a pizza I made, because I think I might be finally starting to get the hang of our pizza oven.

Gallery: A Field Trip, Thanksgiving, and Gingerbread Houses

Walkathon, Soccer, and Autumn Adventures

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October and November have been extremely busy months for us, mostly for the best. Julia started a new job; William wrapped up the soccer season and the annual school Walkathon; and Joe continued his long slog through the college admissions process with some campus visits and the completion of his first batch of college applications. It wasn’t all sunshine: we had some health scares and minor todos that we had to get through, but nothing worth spelling out here. As always, we have a batch of pictures documenting the fun and frivolity.

One exciting development is that Julia has started a job at Engenius, an on-site after-school care program at Booksin. It’s kind of a spiritual successor to the Y-Care program that Julia and Joe both attended when they were younger—Y-Care is still there, but greatly diminished—and some of the caregivers that used to look after the two of them are now supervisors at Engenius. Julia is working with the first graders and is enjoying herself so far; she is worn out by the end of the day. She’s still taking classes as well, but work gives her a little more independence, which she craves, and helps her to structure her days.

October also brought the annual Booksin Walkathon. We had to cut our time there a little short, because Will had a soccer game that afternoon, but he still managed to walk 13 miles and spend some quality time with friends. Julie ran the registration desk, as she had the year before, and I volunteered to supervise the bounce house in the morning. We didn’t see too much of Will until it was nearly time to go, but I did managed to snag a few photos as he raced by.

The week after the walkathon, William wrapped up the soccer season with a pair of games at the league’s end-of-season jamboree. This was his first season in this particular recreational league, run by Almaden FC, and he improved his skills significantly during the year. His team had mixed results in the win/loss columns, but he learned quite a bit about the game and has decided that midfield is his favorite position.

The same afternoon as the soccer jamboree, Joe and Julie jetted off to southern California for another round of college visits, probably the last of the year. They stayed for just one night and crammed in Caltech, UC San Diego, and San Diego state before flying back midday the next day. With Julia at a party, Will and I were left to our own devices that evening. We treated ourselves to homemade BLTs and had a quiet evening at home. Due to an unfortunate confluence of events, Julie and Joe missed their flight home the next day, but caught a later flight and were home by bedtime.

Joe is slowly working his way through the very long list of schools he’s decided to apply to. Princeton remains his first choice, and he submitted his application just ahead of the early action deadline on November 1. The University of Washington was next, as their regular application deadline was November 15. After that, he completed applications for the University of California system schools and San Diego State. That puts him at seven schools so far, which is already more than the total of five I applied to when I was a senior.

This Thanksgiving weekend, we’re hoping to push through the process for a number of additional schools on his list, including Rice, the University of Chicago, and others. The application deadlines for all of the remaining schools are in early January, but we’re hoping he’ll be able to finish up as many as he can now, so he doesn’t have to worry about college essays as the end of the semester approaches. It’s been a challenging process, as Joe is very conscientious about not coming across as fake or misrepresenting his interests and accomplishments; playing the game of selling himself to admissions officers doesn’t come naturally to him. Nevertheless, Julie and I have enjoyed helping him fine-tune his essays: we’ve been spending an hour or so with him most evenings after William goes to bed, and we’re grateful for the chance to share this quality time, even if he’s not always happy about it.

William has always loved dressing up in costume, so Halloween is one of his favorite holidays. This year, he chose to go as the Tenth Doctor from Doctor Who, wearing a fantastic ensemble that Julie put together, complete with a sonic screwdriver.1 I took a number of pictures of him in costume, but the best one was taken by another parent in the classroom during the school day; it’s a fantastic shot.

In the evening, William went trick-or-treating with his good friend Bridget. For the most part, they wandered around the neighborhood by themselves, leaving Julie and me at home; if Will hadn’t decided that he wanted some company toward the end of the evening, it would have been the first year since 2005 that we accompany someone in search of candy. I think Will was a little less excited than Bridget about going out without parental supervision, but it definitely seems likely that we’ll be out of a job next year, nonetheless.

The rest of the gallery is a potpourri of miscellaneous shots: a few pictures of a work kayaking outing on the Monterey Bay; patio string lights that were the fulfillment of a long overdue promise; and a picture of Grandma Moravec’s pork and rice recipe, which we make all too infrequently.

  1. Astute observers will note that he actually has the Fourteenth Doctor’s sonic screwdriver. It was all we could find on short notice. Don’t ask what it cost.

Gallery: Walkathon, Soccer, and Autumn Adventures

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

Christmas 2022

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Christmas last year was busy, and the frenetic pace has continued through the early months of 2023—hence the relative lateness of this collection of holiday photos.

For us, the holiday season started just after Thanksgiving, when we visited the San José Women’s Club to decorate gingerbread houses, as has been our tradition for the last several years. We even enticed Julia to come along, along with Grandma Flack, who was spending her first Christmas here in California.

Around mid-month, we decorated the first of our two Christmas trees for the year. This one was our own family tree, using the ornaments and lights we’ve accumulated over the years. It’s starting to get a little wobbly after about twenty-four years of service, but it survived another holiday; we’ll see how it’s doing next December.

We decorated the second tree on Christmas Eve using Grandma Flack’s family ornaments. This was our first natural tree in many years, but since Julie was planning to stay home through the holidays—more on that in a bit—it seemed like a good year to have one. With our tree in the family room and the Flack tree in the living room, our house felt very festive indeed.

As pandemic restrictions have eased, certain customs have returned after a prolonged absence. Among them: in-person, indoor musical performances at school. We had two of these this year. The first was a concert of holiday songs put on by William’s class. As you can see in the pictures, Will, always happy to put on a show, wore his favorite winter gloves, which feature puppets on the end of each finger.

The second performance was a band concert at UPA. For this show, Joe picked up a new instrument, the soprano saxophone, to play certain parts, though his primary focus remains the clarinet. He and his small ensemble also played a pair of pieces to bookend the main body of the concert; they spent many hours practicing after school last fall to get their songs down.

The album contains several videos along with the usual selection of photos. William’s concert in particular had a very specific resonance: the last time we were on Booksin’s campus for a concert was March 6, 2020, just a week before our county shut down for the pandemic. I remember wondering at the time if it was a good idea for us all to be there; the kindergarten performances were first thing in the morning, and by afternoon, the concerts for the remaining classes had already been canceled. I flew to Los Angeles later that day for a quick work trip, and my return flight that evening was my last air travel until December 2021.

Speaking of Covid, remember how I said that I’d have more about our travel plans a few paragraphs ago? Well, funny story: after avoiding Covid for nearly three years through equal parts luck and vigilance, our family finally caught it over the holidays. The plan had been for the kids and me to travel to Texas to visit my parents on the day after Christmas—because it was her mother’s first holiday here, Julie was going to stay home with her—but obviously that didn’t happen.

Here’s how things played out. Julie’s brother Bill arrived a few days before Christmas, having driven cross-country from Nebraska. When he arrived, he warned us that his throat had started feeling scratch that morning. Wanting to be cautious, we had him take a antibody test, which came up negative. At that point, we let our guard down a bit, and didn’t take any special precautions. Big mistake. Over the next few days, his symptoms worsened, and Julie, Julia, Joseph, and I all started to feel like we had colds coming on. By Christmas Day, we were definitely sick. That evening, feeling lousy, we tested again, and Grandma Flack, Bill, Julie, Joe, and I were all positive. Julia didn’t bother testing, since her diagnosis seemed like a foregone conclusion.

Our trip to Texas was obviously not going to happen. But, in a strange twist of fate, it might not have happened anyway: our tickets were booked on Southwest Airlines, which, owing to a confluence of bad luck and antiquated systems, suffered a complete meltdown the week of Christmas. Our flights ended up being canceled, and it’s not clear when or even if they could have gotten us to Austin.

Now that we knew we were positive, there wasn’t much for us to do other than hunker down and wait the virus out. Because William was still testing negative, we tried to isolate him as much as we could for the first day. It wasn’t going to last—more than anyone else in the family, he hates to be alone—and he ended up testing positive within twenty-four hours anyway, so we all got to be sick together.

Julie and I went on a hunt for Paxlovid prescriptions for the family, which turned out to be harder than we thought it would be. The criteria for prescribing it seemed to vary quite a bit from doctor to doctor, but eventually we managed to get prescriptions for everyone. It certainly seemed to have worked for me, at least initially: my symptoms were never anywhere close to severe, and I tested negative in about a week, on January 3. On the other hand, a couple days later, I rebounded and started testing positive again. I didn’t feel appreciably sicker, but it took me until January 13 to test negative consistently; by the end, I was really itching to get out of the house.

Viral drama aside, there are a few non-holiday photos in the gallery. There are some shots of Grandma Flack’s new apartment, taken after we hung her pictures; with everything set up, it feels very much like her place. And there are a pair of candid selfies of Julie and Joe at the DMV as Joe took and passed his driver’s test.

This actually wasn’t the first time the two of them visited the DMV intending to take the test: a couple weeks earlier, they made the trip only to learn that, due to some understandable confusion regarding the wording on the web site, they had scheduled the wrong kind of appointment. As a result, they had to make another appointment for a later date. Unfortunately, the next available appointment was more than 18 months after Joe’s original permit had been issued—and, more importantly, after it expired. They had to make a special trip to renew his permit first before returning a second time for the test.

In the end, everything worked out: he passed the test on his first try, and he is now a legally licensed driver in the state of California. That’s not to say he enjoys driving: I think the idea of it was much more alluring than the reality. But he can take himself to music lessons and to after-school activities, which is helpful on busy school nights. And should the occasion arise, he’ll be able to drive to meet up with friends, which I think he’ll find liberating.

Gallery: Christmas 2022

Mother’s Day 2014

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As we approach the end of summer—Joe and William are both already back in school, and Julia is just a couple weeks away from starting college—we have a quick trip down memory lane: a selection of photos from Mother’s Day, 2014.

We celebrated the holiday with our pre-pandemic tradition of visiting the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk. Some years, it’s been too cold or windy, and we’ve had to delay our visit until later in the year, but the weather was perfect for this trip. By the time we got there, it was warm enough for the kids to frolic on the beach and in the surf, and we even had a visit from a passing dolphin.

When we’d had enough of the sand and water, we headed up to the boardwalk to partake of its gifts, primarily unhealthy food and carnival rides. Pay particular attention to the look of abject terror on Joe’s face on the Rock & Roll ride.

Even William, then less than a year old, had a great time. There were plenty of new and novel sights, sounds, and smells for him to experience, and he has always been happy to spend a day out with the family.

Gallery: Mother’s Day 2014

Easter 2014

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This week, we’re going nearly eight years into the past to bring you a set of previously un-published photos from Easter 2014. As old as these images are—and bearing in mind that William was barely six months old at the time—their personalities shine through to an impressive degree. In particular, William’s expression of sheer joy at the experience of playing with empty plastic Easter eggs is a favorite of mine.

In more timely news, Joe and Julia are both preparing for the next school year, even though this one is only halfway complete. Joe has signed up for no fewer than five AP classes in his junior year, while Julia is still waiting to hear back from some of the colleges she applied to. She remains very happy that she was accepted by Santa Clara University, as the idea of staying close to home—and Felix—is strongly appealing to her, but it’s always nice to have choices.

For his part, William is very excited to have a very small speaking role in his school’s production of Peter Pan Jr.. He had actually planned to try out for a bigger part, but he somehow didn’t hear when the second graders were called in to audition. He was upset at the time—tears were shed—but he’s happy to have a role in the play.

Baseball season has started up again, and William was glad to learn that he’s on the same team as a bunch of kids he knows from school. It will be hard to top the experience he had last spring, but he’s having a great time so far. My only gripe is that we had a practice at 9:00 this morning, the first day of a long weekend. William didn’t have any trouble getting up for it, but I certainly did. I may have taken a nap when we got home.

Gallery: Easter 2014

Christmas 2021

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We just wrapped up our trip to Nebraska for Christmas 2021, and it was something of a welcome return to normal holiday routine after two years of relative isolation. In fact, it was my first time going anywhere since February of 2020, which made the whole experience a bit jarring: I’d forgotten many of the petty indignities of air travel.

There was a flurry of activity before we left, which made the week we spent in Nebraska feel all the more relaxing. We put up Christmas decorations in and on the house for the first time since the remodel, including icicles on the second-floor eaves. We weren’t quite sure how to accomplish that, so we paid a team of folks to take care of it, and they made short work of the project. On the whole, they did a pretty good job—the lights look great—but they did leave the exposed end of our triple-trap extension cord in a place where it could slide into the gutter in the event of rain, which naturally, it did a few days later. After we realized the lights weren’t working, Julie and I spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out how to reset the GFCI for the circuit, which happened to be inside the garage, not obviously connected to the outlet the lights were plugged into.

We also added a light-up pig to our front yard ensemble—something that Julie has long desired—and we put electric candles (gifts from Grandma and Grandpa Wong) in the windows of Joe’s bedroom and the play room. When everything is turned on, it seems almost as bright as day in front of the house, but our setup pales in comparison to some of the neighbors’. We noticed this at Halloween, as well: it seems like many people have channeled pent-up energy from being stuck at home into creating ever more fantastic holiday displays.

We set up our Christmas tree at home around mid-month so that we’d have at least a little time to enjoy it before we left town. We debated whether to put it in the family room or the living room and ultimately opted for the latter, right in front of the picture window facing the street. That way, it’s visible from outside when we have the drapes open, and it feels a little more special because it’s in a room we don’t use that often otherwise.

Due to quirks in the San Jose Unified and UPA academic calendars, William’s holiday break started almost a full week before Julia and Joe’s: their semester didn’t end until December 22, while William was released on December 17. With that in mind, Julie made arrangements to fly to Nebraska with William ahead of us, giving the two of them time to bake cookies and otherwise prepare for Christmas while the big kids wrapped up their final exams.

Julie and William left the Sunday before Christmas, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves for a few days. Things went relatively smoothly, other than the fact that by mid-day Monday I was experiencing some mild sinus congestion and other low grade cold symptoms. After not having been sick—not even a sniffle—for twenty-two months, my mind went to the worst case scenario: what if we were stuck at home for Christmas while Julie and William were in Nebraska? Fortunately, Julie had picked up some rapid antigen tests for Covid-19 a few weeks earlier, and I came up negative both Monday evening and Wednesday night. A PCR test on Tuesday confirmed the negative result Thursday morning, so I felt OK with flying later that day.

Of course, feeling OK with flying didn’t make the process any less unpleasant than it always is. And flying in the middle of a pandemic made it that much worse. We saw the full spectrum of people’s inability to follow simple directions during our trip: people who “forgot” to put on their masks when they entered the airport; people walking around with their noses hanging out, uncaring or oblivious; people who took off their masks to talk loudly on the phone; and much, much more.

At the departure gate in San José, an older couple sat down a couple seats away from us. The woman was clearly unwell: she was bleary-eyed and sniffly, and looked as though she would have much rather have been in bed. That would have been fine—I wasn’t feeling great, either—but as she started a coughing fit, she pulled off her mask. We just got up and moved at that point; I have no idea what she was sick with, but there didn’t seem to hang around nearby.

Beyond those annoyances, things went smoothly. We were very fortunate that our flights weren’t affected by the wave of cancellations that swept through the industry over the holidays, and we made it to Omaha with no complications more serious than a bit of moderate turbulence heading into and out of Salt Lake City.

Julie picked us up at the airport in Omaha, and it was a nice change of pace to arrive during daylight hours rather than near midnight, as we have in the past. We made a quick stop at a Runza drive-though for dinner and headed up to Norfolk.

The kids were excited to see Grandma Flack and their uncles Bill and Andrew, and it was comforting to participate in Julie’s family traditions. We had roast beef on Christmas Eve and decorated the tree after dinner. On Christmas morning, we opened presents at 8:00 sharp—Julia and Joe are old enough that they probably would have been happy to sleep in, but William was having none of that—and, borrowing a tradition from Grandma and Grandpa Wong, had cinnamon rolls for breakfast. That night, we roasted a turkey that Julie had started brining the day before, and there were plenty of leftovers for soup and turkey sandwiches in the days that followed.

The rest of the visit was even more laid back and relaxing than usual: because of concerns about Covid, we didn’t go out much except for near-daily curbside pickup runs at the grocery store. This gave Julia and Joe some time to slow down and relax after finals, while William was happy just to have so many people around to entertain him. Julia made vast quantities of bacon for breakfast nearly every day, and all three kids ate prodigious amounts of Spaghetti-O’s at lunch throughout our visit.

Our one big outing was to visit Aunt Julie at her nursing home in Madison. To accommodate families who want to visit residents as a group, the facility allows you to book the dining room in the assisted living wing so you can enjoy a private family meal. You can choose between whatever happens to be on the menu that evening or bring your own food, which really didn’t feel like much of a choice at all. Julie and Grandma Flack ordered a hot pulled pork meal, throwing in some brownies as a treat, from the HyVee in Norfolk, and made plans to pick it up on our way to the nursing home.

Unfortunately, things went sideways from there. When we pulled into the marked pickup spot at HyVee and called the number posted on the adjacent sign, we were sent straight to voice mail. We tried a few more times over the next few minutes and couldn’t get through to a person; worse, we discovered the the voice mailbox was full, so we couldn’t leave a message even if we wanted to.

Frustrated, Julie called the main number for the grocery store and spoke to a very nice woman who told us she would put us through the kitchen. We then sat and listened to grocery store sounds for what seemed like an eternity before Julie gave up and called the main line again. This time, the nice woman told us she would walk over to the kitchen to make sure we got through and, to her credit, she did just that. Julie chatted briefly with someone on the other end who assured us that our order would be out promptly.

“Promptly” means different things to different people, but finally, after what felt like a pretty long wait, someone appeared at the car window with brownies and… nothing else. Julie pointed out that this wasn’t right—she had the original order confirmation on her phone—and the person disappeared back into the store leaving us to wait still longer. Finally, the store employee reappeared accompanied by someone from the kitchen who explained their systems didn’t show anything in our order except brownies; the rest of our items seemed to have vanished into the ether.

Out of patience and time, as we’d spent more than twenty minutes sitting in the parking lot, and Grandma Flack and Uncle Bill had already arrived at the nursing home, we took the brownies and audibled: instead of pulled pork, we would have delicious Arby’s roast beef sandwiches for dinner. We zipped off to the drive-through, put in an order for a pile of sandwiches and various types of fries, and finally started on our way to Madison. Luckily for us, they couldn’t start dinner without us because we had all the food.

All the drama aside, we had a very pleasant visit with Aunt Julie; because we had the dining room to ourselves, we could relax and move around without feeling rushed or like we were in the way. Aunt Julie and Julia really hit it off, as Julia regaled her with stories of cute things Felix has done over the last couple years, illustrated by pictures from her phone. Our one major regret is that, after all the excitement, I forgot to take pictures while we were there.

Our return trip on December 30 was blissfully uneventful. Getting home before the start of the new year left us with plenty of time to wind down and re-acclimate to life at home before William’s return to school on January 4 (the older kids, having finished later in December, don’t start again until January 10—this left us plenty of time for Julia to work on college applications). It also allowed us to enjoy one final holiday tradition: Big Fat Pancakes for dinner on New Year’s Day.

Gallery: Christmas 2021

Cold Weather, Ch-Ch-Changes, and Fall 2013

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It’s finally starting to cool off in our part of California—a part which, fortunately for us, is not currently on fire; there are many who are not so lucky. It’s going to get down to 42° Fahrenheit tonight, a temperature that isn’t that cold by Chicago or Nebraska standards, but still feels pretty chilly when you’re shivering outside the school waiting for the bell to ring.

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that we don’t currently have a functioning furnace. Ours stopped working sometime last winter, and we decided against an expensive repair because we thought that we would surely be out of the house and ensconced in a rental by the time the next winter rolled around. That assumption has worked out really well for us.

For now, the first thing I do in the morning is step into a pair of cozy slippers and pull on a heavy sweatshirt before I head up to the kitchen to make the kids’ lunches. And, after they’ve gone and it’s time for me to get ready for work, I think long and hard before I turn off the water and step out of the warm confines of the shower onto the icy tiles of our bathroom floor.

Of course, the chill in the air means that Halloween is just around the corner. William carved a pumpkin (with Julie’s help) at school today, and had decided, the last time I asked him, that he wanted to dress up as Darth Vader this year. Fortunately, that’s one of the many costumes we already have in his vast collection, so as long as he doesn’t change his mind, we won’t have to buy a new one this year.

This Halloween, for the first time, neither Julia nor Joe seems to be interested in trick-or-treating. Instead, they’re planning to stay home to hand out candy or, just as likely, hide out in their rooms. Although this was an inevitable transition, it’s still bittersweet: they have so much going on in their lives, and so many stressors coming at them from so many different angles, I wish they could hang on to their sense of wonder and fun for one more Halloween and have a night of carefree jollity.

Speaking of fun, frivolity, and bittersweet transitions, we received an email from UPA this week letting us know that the registration deadline for students taking AP tests this year is coming up in a couple weeks. And, in a real first, Julia will be eligible to take the AP World History exam in the spring. I’m gobsmacked that our daughter is taking concrete steps toward (hopefully) receiving college credits, while the memory of her clinging to me every morning as I tried to drop her off for kindergarten is still painfully fresh in my mind.

In other fun news, Julia is set to have her wisdom teeth removed over the holiday break after we return home from Nebraska. This step is a prelude to a series of other procedures on tap for the next couple years that won’t be fun—for us or for her—in the moment, but will pay off down the road if all goes according to plan.

We don’t have any new pictures ready to post at the moment, though I do hope to publish a set this weekend covering Halloween and some other fall adventures. In the meantime, here’s a set of previously unpublished photos from fall 2013 that I’ve finally gotten around to processing. The album contains lots of soccer pictures, any number of cute shots of baby William, and a few snapshots from my very first visit to the Airtime offices in New York City.

Gallery: Fall 2013

Christmas 2017

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It’s officially summer here in San José: the kids are out of school; Julie has taken the three of them to Nebraska (and back); and Julia is off to Camp Campbell this afternoon.

But the biggest news of the year so far is that we are somehow the parents of a high school student. This would have seemed inconceivable just a few years ago, but we’ve checked, and it appears to be true.

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Even scarier, if we’ve done the math right, Joe will be taking the same step in just a couple years’ time. Of course, William won’t be done with eighth grade for another ten years, so we still have a long road ahead of us; we’re not done with packing lunches by a long shot.

It‘s Father’s Day today, and we’ve celebrated thus far by eating donuts for breakfast, after which Julie took the boys out for some Parks for Life activities. After lunch, I’ll be taking Julia to camp—she’s at the stage of her life in which being seen in public with a single parent is excruciatingly embarrassing, and being seen with her entire family would be utterly intolerable—and assuming my car has enough charge to make it back down the mountain, we’ll go out for a hike (more Parks for Life) and then have pizza this evening.

Speaking of Parks for Life, on one of the activities earlier this summer, William made an unexpected (and unwelcome) friend:

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He doesn’t seem to have suffered any real adverse effects—there are no signs of a bull’s eye rash—and he was an complete champ about having it removed, but it was still something of a shock. For all the traipsing around in the woods we’ve done, going all the way back to my childhood, none of us had ever picked up a tick before. Never let it be said that we haven’t exposed to the kids to a variety of different experiences.

All that aside, we’ve posted a few more recent pictures this time around, from our trip to Nebraska for Christmas last year. We’ll be back to our regular schedule of six-year-old photos shortly, but I thought it might be nice to mix in a few of more recent vintage.

Gallery: Christmas 2017