Category Archives: Joseph

Summer 2012 – Video

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In the wake of last week’s batch of pictures from the summer, we’ve put together a short video covering the same timeframe.

Julie also reminded me of an anecdote I forgot to mention last time. In the registration paperwork for Julia’s week at Camp Campbell, there was a section in which Julia could express her preferences and tastes on a number of subjects. One question asked what kind of counselor she would like. Characteristically, Julia wrote, “I would like a counselor who is not too strict.”

As the girls were unpacking after our arrival at camp, the counselors chatted amiably with everyone, trying to put the campers and their parents at ease. They asked Julia what she had put down on the form, and when she answered—a bit sheepishly—they knew exactly who she was. Julia can make an impression even before she makes an appearance.

Summer 2012

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Summer ended three months ago, and we finally have the pictures to show for it.

The kids spent most of the summer in a variety of different week-long camps run by the local YMCA: Lego Robotics, Delicious Science and Cooking, Swimming, etc. However, the big one, for Julia at least, was Camp Campbell: an actual overnight camp. Camp Campbell is where Joe and I camped with the Adventure Guides last spring, so we’d been looking for an opportunity to give Julia a chance to try it as well (though Julia ended up sleeping in much nicer accommodations than Joe and I had). The Y offers a shortened, three-day session for younger kids, and we timed it so that Julia could go at the same time as Phoebe and Zoe Dueltgen, two of her oldest friends. Somehow, Julia, her cabin-mates, the counsellors and the campground all emerged more or less unscathed, and Julia is looking forward to going back for a full week next year.

Toward the end of July—more or less the end of summer as well, because of the way the school year is set up—we traveled to Chicago to visit family and experience humidity. We succeeded in accomplishing the former goal, but utterly failed in the latter: the Chicago area (as well as much of the midwest) spent the year in the throes of a punishing drought. It was drier there—and the grass deader—than I ever remember it being.

The heat didn’t deter the kids, of course. My Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack graciously invited us over to their place to celebrate my cousin Caitlin’s 18th birthday and to swim in their pool. Julia was happy to show off the progress she’d made at swim camp over the summer, but Joe was still not 100% comfortable in the water, as the photos show.

We also made a trip to Donley’s Wild West Town, out in Union, Illinois. Donley’s has been around since 1974, but somehow it escaped our attention until this year; thus, it was new to all of us. It’s a quaint little amusement park with a few low-key rides, games and activities, pony rides and an action-packed Wild West Show that runs thrice daily.

Julia and Joe had a great time at the park, though Julia had a bit of a run-in with a fractious pair of ponies. She was the first person to line up for a pony ride in the morning, and the first pony she rode on got a little antsy toward the end of the ride. And by “antsy” I mean that the pony actively tried to throw her. To her credit, Julia was calm and collected (or merely paralyzed with fear) throughout. She even hung around to give it another shot on a different pony after Joe took his turn, but that pony also decided that it wasn’t particularly interested in carrying her—so maybe it was Julia after all. In any event, it appears that we don’t have to worry about shelling out for lessons in equestrianism any time soon.

Joe’s favorite activity at Donley’s, by far, was the canoe ride, in which riders float slowly around a circuit filled with suspiciously blue water, propelled by a current generated by unseen forces. Given a chance, Joe would likely have ridden the canoes all day long: it’s an open question as to whether he would have succumbed to sunstroke before poisoning himself by dragging his hands in the unnaturally azure waters and sucking his thumb.

Naturally, we visited my grandparents while we were in town. We were lucky to be there at the same time as my cousin Leslie, whom I hadn’t seen in many years—a bit ironically, as she lives closer to us than any of my other relatives, in Orangevale, California. In looking at the pictures from this part of the trip, you may notice that one appears to have been very heavily processed. This wasn’t an effort on my part to show off my artistic sensibilities; rather, it was the one shot that caught everyone with somewhat reasonable facial expressions, and it came out of the camera very underexposed. I did my best to salvage it with my limited skills.

There is one other photo for which I took a pretty aggressive approach to editing, but I’ll leave that one for you to identify.

On the subject of photographing uncooperative subjects, the last sequence of pictures in the set was taken by my mother on the deck in our backyard in a somewhat futile effort to get a standard, nice portrait of both kids together. I’m not sure any of them really qualify by that measure, but taken as a whole, I felt they captured the essence of the kids’ personalities and their relationship, at least on that particular day.

Captain America vs. The Candy Corn Witch

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Julia and Joseph have declared Halloween their second-favorite holiday after, of course, Christmas. Their love for holidays seems to be proportional to the total mass of the the stuff they receive in observance of the date. By this metric, Flag Day seems to be a big loser: school is usually out by the time mid-June rolls around, so they don’t even get cookies at a class party.

This year, the kids decided they had to get their pumpkin at the pop-up pumpkin “patch” in the parking lot of the light-rail station near our house. I tried in vain to convince them of the advantages of some of the more authentic alternatives—corn mazes, bunnies, working trains, etc.—but they were unmoved. The allure of the giant, inflatable shark slide they saw from the car was too much to resist.

Incidentally, the night before our trip to the pumpkin lot, we had dinner at the very same parking facility. There’s a local company, Moveable Feast, that brings together food trucks from around the area on nights and weekends. Joe, Julia and I had pretty traditional food truck fare: burritos and hot dogs. Julie, on the other hand, went all-out with a bacon cheeseburger that featured two halves of a glazed donut in place of a bun. It was a welcome change of pace—there were a ton of interesting options—and a unique experience (not to mention a convenient way for the food truck operators to make a bit of extra money outside their normal peak hours). Julie has almost fully recovered.

We picked up the pumpkin on Saturday, but didn’t get a chance to carve it until Wednesday afternoon, the day of Halloween. Julia was working on her Pitcher Pressure book report all day Sunday, and the kids were tied up with activities and errands Monday and Tuesday. With Spanish class, soccer practice and Julia’s science class, their days are far more fully booked than I remember mine being when I was either of their ages.

Scheduling concerns aside, the pumpkin did get carved, and the kids were ready for trick-or-treating by the time I made it home Wednesday night. Joe had planned to go as Spider-Man right up to the day the kids and Julie went shopping, when he changed his mind and decided he wanted to be Captain America. Julia originally thought she would re-use her Spider-Girl costume from last year, which would have conveniently allowed us to save a bit of money. Naturally, that impulse didn’t last—it never stood a chance, really—and she decided she would make up her mind at the costume store. Were she like me, this would have had the makings of a colossal disaster, but Julia found her outfit at the very first shop they visited. She elected to go as a candy corn witch, complete with a candy corn hat and a candy corn shirt. Julie even took her to get her nails done in the familiar candy corn pattern, an excursion which kept her out late on a school night, but everyone seems to have survived.

We have pictures, of course. There’s not much time to dwell on Halloween for now: the Toys ’R Us holiday catalog came in the mail yesterday, and the kids are busily circling the items they’d like Santa to bring for Christmas.

School Pictures 2012

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We have a ton of photos in the queue, and not just because we’re perpetually behind. In particular, we took a short trip down to the Monterey area last weekend, and managed to capture several dozen pictures just of the California coast.

In the meantime, while you have that to look forward to, I’ve uploaded Julia and Joseph’s most recent class pictures.

Playhouse

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Last summer, our next-door neighbor Chris moved out of Willow Glen to be closer to where his daughter would be attending school in the fall. As he was packing up, he made a fateful (for us) decision: he was finished tearing down and reassembling the playhouse he’d built for his daughter every time he moved, and he graciously offered it to us.

Chris and Julie worked all afternoon one weekend, hauling the disassembled pieces of the playhouse over to our yard. The process was made more tedious by the dilapidated fence separating our properties; it might have been easier to just tear down the fence and carry everything directly across. Better still, the structure was apparently home to what Julie insists were black widow spiders, which lent the venture a heightened sense of excitement and danger.

The pieces sat on our patio for a few weeks, until Julie’s brother Bill and his friend Wayne swung through town for a visit. Never one to shy away from making good use of visiting family (as Bill probably should have remembered from his last visit, the month before Julia was born), Julie put the pair to work, and they got the frame of the first floor of the playhouse put together that weekend.

Julie and I made good progress on the second story—yes, the kids’ playhouse has more floors than our actual house—the next weekend, and there things sort of stalled. We took a trip to Chicago, the kids started school, and the next thing you know, the rainy season came.

This spring, then, Julie issued an ultimatum: we finish the playhouse by July, or she would hire someone to finish it for us. This made an impression on a couple of levels. First, not completing the project on our own would have felt like a massive failure of parenting, perhaps one that would leave a lasting mark on the kids’ psyches. Second, I’m cheap.

With renewed motivation, we pushed forward, and though we didn’t quite make it by the deadline, we did finally complete construction about 13 months after we started. Now the kids want to paint it.

We’ve posted pictures covering the long history of the project. Please don’t forward them to our insurance agent, as I’d like to avoid being forced to increase our personal liability coverage.

Joe Turns Six (and the Ghost of Christmas Past)

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It’s summer here in San Jose, so naturally I’m staying inside to post pictures of the kids. The alternative—working outside in the yard—is too frightening to contemplate.

We actually have two new sets of pictures up on the site this weekend. The first is a batch of photos from the last month or so, including Joe’s sixth birthday. The second takes us a little further back in time, all the way to Christmas 2008.

Seeing as it’s early June, the biggest news, of course, is that Joe’s birthday has come and gone. We played it pretty low key this year: just the family, Joe’s choice of dinner (cheeseburgers cooked on the grill) and an ice cream cake. Lego Ninjago seemed to be the overriding theme. It’s become cliché to comment on how different Lego sets are from the ones people my age had growing up, but, well, they’re definitely different. Nevertheless, there are certainly worse pastimes, like his other obsessions, Sonic and Mario.

Speaking of toys I had growing up, my parents sent us a Magic Shot, which is a near replica of the one my brother had when he and I were little—it even has the same half-functioning bell. Magic Shot consists of a plastic box, a magnetic gun, and a slew of metal BB pellets that you can shoot at targets inside the box. Now that’s a good, old-fashioned toy.

I apologize for the somewhat low quality of the birthday pictures: our main camera is broken, and Julie’s fancy new phone wasn’t charged, so we were left to capture the moment with my old phone.

Just about a year ago, Joe had his first visit from the tooth fairy after he lost one of his bottom front teeth. This seemed a bit early, as Julia still hadn’t lost her first tooth yet, but still within the realm of reason: his teeth came in earlier than hers, after all. Well, as of this writing, Joe has lost six teeth altogether, including his two top front teeth and both lower canines just in the last couple months. Suffice it to say that he’s not gnawing on a lot of beef jerky.

At this point, I have no idea if this is completely normal, cause for panic, or something in between. We’re going to give it a couple weeks to see if his permanent teeth start poking through his gums. He still sucks his thumb more or less compulsively, so that may be a factor. He’s also been playing with his “loose” teeth constantly, so I’m vaguely concerned that he’s actually making them loose in anticipation of the big tooth fairy payout. If this doesn’t stop, we’re either going to have to coat his fingers with something foul tasting or give him a quick lesson in economics: he might be a bit less excited about the dollar coins the tooth fairy brings if he understands that each of them covers about fifteen seconds of a college education.

Christmas 2011

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After another extended absence, we’re back, this time bearing pictures from the 2011 holiday season, highlighted by our trip to see Grandma Flack in Nebraska. This year’s trip was a little bit bittersweet for Julie and the kids, as it was the first time we’ve spent the holiday at Grandma’s new house in Norfolk. Of course, Julia and Joseph adapted quickly: they were thrilled out of their minds to be spending a whole week in a house with stairs (or, as they call it, a “stair house”) and sleeping in the basement.

As usual when we fly to Nebraska, our midday flight out of San José left us arriving in Omaha late in the evening, and the two-hour drive to Norfolk meant that we weren’t going to get there at a decent hour. In a change from previous Christmas trips, we rented a car at the airport; this assuaged our guilt about our late arrival somewhat, because it meant that Julie’s brother Bill didn’t have to trek down to Omaha to pick us up. The kids were inexplicably excited about the rental (more Wong vocabulary: a “borrow car”), but there was a small wrinkle: the box of gifts we’d checked on the flight over—necessarily only because I somehow managed to have most of our gifts shipped to our house instead of Nebraska—wouldn’t fit in the trunk. Somehow, Julie managed to squeeze it in, albeit not with doing significant damage its structural integrity. It wouldn’t be the same again.

Julia and Joseph are at an age where flying with them actually isn’t torture. This worked out well for us, because there was a glitch with our tickets that resulted in us being separated on the first leg of our flight. I probably should have been worried when United’s online check-in system wouldn’t work for my reservation, but didn’t have a problem with everyone else’s. Everything was fine when we got to the counter to check our luggage, however, and it wasn’t until I tried to board that things went sideways and the computer rejected my boarding pass out of hand. Fortunately, the gate agent was able to straighten things out in short order.

As I was saying, the kids were well-behaved pretty much the whole time we were airborne. Julia spent most of the time doing Mad Libs, which I wasn’t aware had made the transition to the twenty-first century. Other than the fact that she had to be dissuaded from using the same adjective for every blank on a particular page, she more or less got the hang of it. For Joe, the highlight of the day came as we were boarding the flight from Denver to Omaha. The captain, having overheard one of the flight attendants chatting with Julia, noticed Joe as he came aboard and invited him into the cockpit. He gave him a quick rundown of the controls, let him sit in the pilot’s seat, and even let him try on his hat. I have no idea if this was legal or kosher in this hyper-paranoid era, but it absolutely made Joe’s day. He spent the rest of the flight telling people that he had learned how to be a pilot and trying to explain to me which handle controlled the air brake.

On the topic of security, I got to go through the body scanners that are funding Michael Chertoff’s retirement on the way out of San José, so if you find naked pictures of me on the Internet, that’s totally the reason, not my seldom-indulged exhibitionist streak.

Everyone had a blast the whole time we were in Nebraska. We got to eat at Runza and, for the first time in almost 13 years, Jimmy John’s; we helped Julie’s brother Andy help set up a new computer for Grandma Flacks, which I sincerely hope is still working; Julie and I managed to sneak out of the house after the kids went to sleep to catch a movie; and we had lots of time to relax, read books and do Lego with the kids—Andy was especially involved in that process. Of course, Julia and Joseph were most excited to see their only cousins, Tony and Greg. Tony and Greg have lots of cousins on their mother Beth’s side, so they were probably a bit baffled by the raw intensity of the attention they received from our kids, but they handled the situation with grace and aplomb. Little do they know that their kindness only ensures that Julia and Joseph will be equally enthusiastic the next time they come for a visit.

Less Toothy Grin

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Joe lost his first tooth this morning, after a solid week of wiggling it with his fingers, carefully chewing with the side of his mouth, and rolling it around with his tongue. It was just about ready to come out last night: Julie offered to finish the job, but Joe, a little uncomfortable with the idea, demurred. But today, he marched right into our bedroom, woke us up, and informed us that he was ready to make it happen. You can see the happy outcome above.

Note: I’m actually cheating a bit here, and posting this on July 9, as I’m moving the contents of the blog from iWeb to WordPress. The official story is that IMSA’s summary termination of shell services left things in limbo for months, including the time period during which Joe lost his tooth. A more cynical reader might take the view that I just copied over the post about this very tooth’s arrival, and realized belatedly that we hadn’t written anything when it fell about. Well, if nothing else, we posted on Facebook.

Norwegian Star / Mexican Riviera / This Bird Has Flown

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Two years ago, my parents took us, my brother and his wife on a cruise through the Mexican Riviera. To this day, the kids still instinctively call any large, oceangoing vessel they see the Norwegian Star, and they’ll be sorely disappointed if we ever take another cruise and we’re not on deck eight.

As part of our ongoing—and seemingly futile—effort to get caught up, here are our photos from the trip.