Category Archives: Joseph

The Final Countdown (To William)

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It seems that 2013 was a busy year, at least judging by how long it’s taking us to get through all the pictures we took. We’re happy to present another new/old album of photos from that era, though this one bears a unique distinction: it’s the final set from before William arrived, harkening back to a simpler time, when Julie and I were
not outnumbered by other members of the family (as long as you don’t count the cats who, unlike the kids, haven’t yet shown much interest in tearing down the familial power structures).

This album documents roughly a month-long period from the middle of August through the middle of September, just a few days before William was born, and it includes Julia’s ninth birthday and a whole lot of soccer. I can only surmise that we were taking more pictures than usual at the time because we were trying to get the hang of the camera we’d bought to capture William’s arrival. This would explain why the album contains an average of four pictures for each day of the month it covers, as well as why the photos were taken using an incoherent mixture of camera settings and lenses (those with an eye for such things will be able to identify the pictures taken with the cheap zoom lens we bought on eBay).

Five-ish years later, things are quite a bit different. William is loving school and is slowly but surely getting the hang of reading, even if he can’t quite handle the differing pronunciations of ”th” and “f”. As a result, his “thirty” sounds a lot like his “forty”, which makes counting games interesting. He is particularly enamored of a classmate of his named Alexa, for whom he’s drawn a great many pictures over the last few weeks (see below). We haven’t yet had the nerve to break it to him that she won’t be attending Booksin next year—she’ll join her siblings at St. Chris.

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Julia has had rehearsals for the school play until 8:00 almost every night of the week; as a result, we’ve often been up until 10:30 or 11:00 finishing up homework and studying. For now, at least, I don’t really begrudge her teenage tendency to sleep in on the weekends: she needs it. Days like a week ago Thursday, when she had to wake up at 4:00 to get the airport for her journalism trip, certainly don’t help.

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Gallery: The Final Countdown (To William)

Extra Summer Fun, 2013 Edition

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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

Early 2013

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We don’t have many new photos to present at the moment, though there are a great many pictures from the summer we have yet to process, so we’ve thrown together a small collection of photos from early 2013, way back before William was born, and not too long after we had learned that he was on his way.

In the meantime, the school year is well under way—we’re entering its third week, and William’s first full day is tomorrow—and the summer’s festivities are gradually coming to an end. The Parks for Life program Julie has been doing with the kids wraps up on Friday, and the older kids’ swimming lessons are finished on Thursday.

So far, Julia has adjusted beautifully to the more complicated world of high school. She’s enjoying her classes, has found a nice group of friends, and even has a part in the school play. She’s been great about working on Khan Academy with me to get ahead of the game in math, and she’s had a positive attitude about working with us to adjust to the greater challenges presented by high school coursework.

Joe, likewise, is staying on top of things. He hasn’t had much homework to speak of yet, but Mr. Guevara, his history teacher and one of the principals behind the founding of UPA, said at Back to School night that we should expect that to change shortly. The biggest challenge he’s facing at the moment is the fact that his clarinet isn’t working right, which has him stressed out and Julie making multiple trips to the music store to get things sorted.

Finally, William is loving TK with Ms. Pak. According to Julie, his only complaints have been that he doesn’t get to stay long enough, and that there’s not enough time to play outside during lunch recess. Both of those complaints will be addressed this week, when the class switches from half days to full days, giving him a longer lunch break and about two and a half extra hours at school each day.

He’s also started working with the new Khan Academy Kids app, which has him very excited because he gets to do “homework” like his older siblings. We’ll see how he feels in a few years when we’re making him do math exercises over the summer.

Even with limited time in class, he’s already producing masterpieces like this:

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One can only imagine what he’ll do with another ten hours every week.

Gallery: Early 2013

Back to School 2018

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It’s been a while since we posted any new pictures—largely because we’ve been busy with other projects—but the new school year has arrived, which means that it’s time for our annual back-to-school pictures.

Julia is starting high school this year, which is scary on any number of levels (though it will actually be more of a shock to me when she starts her sophomore year, for reasons that are specific to my situation). She’s found a nice group of friends and is going into the year with a great deal of enthusiasm that has yet to be damped by the workload, which one of her school administrators promised at the eighth grade promotion ceremony last spring would be heavier than what the kids would encounter in college. I have my doubts about that particular assertion, but nevertheless, the specter of testy late-night study sessions hangs over us.

Joe is moving to UPA for seventh grade this year, which makes this the first time since 2014 that he and Julia have started the year at the same school. He’s a little bit nervous about changing schools after having spent a single year at Willow Glen Middle, but we are hopeful that the change in context will give him a fresh start socially; as our old friend Michael Kimmitt has pointed out, middle school boys are generally awful (though he typically uses more colorful language in his description).

He’s especially nervous about his placement in Advanced Band, where he is the only seventh grader and one of only two middle school kids. He’ll be fine once he gets the music and starts playing—the intermediate band at Willow Glen does a great job of pushing kids’ abilities—but his trepidation reminds me of how an age difference of just a couple years can feel like a yawning chasm in seventh grade.

Lastly, William is starting TK, or transitional kindergarten, this year. It’s a relatively new program at Booksin that provides a bridge to kindergarten for four-year-olds who were born between September 2 and December 2, and thus just missed the cutoff. They start off slowly, with half days for the first couple weeks of the year, but after that, he’ll be at school all day, just like his brother and sister. As you can imagine, this is all very exciting for William—and also for us, even if it means we have to make three lunches every morning instead of two.

Julia's first day of high school

Joe's first day of seventh grade

William gets dressed for school

William's First day of TK

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

Fall 2012

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It’s finally spring here in San José, after a winter that seemed to go on forever. Although we really needed some rain after a dry fall and end to 2017, it’s nice to have some sunshine and warmth. We’ve had a busy few months, with limited time for fun hobbies like sorting through and cleaning up photographs, but I’m very pleased to be able to post a collection of very nice snapshots from a simpler time: all the way back in the fall of 2012. In my defense, I think this is actually the final set of photos from 2012 to get online, so the next batch will be somewhat more recent (though there are still some gaping holes in the last five years).

Since our last post, Julia has completed her long-awaited trip to Washington, D.C. with her eighth-grade class. We dragged her to the airport at 4:00 in the morning on March 30 for an early flight so they could touch down in the afternoon and hit the ground running. She was more awake than I was, as you can see in the photo below; after seeing her off, I went home and slept for another hour or so before heading to work.

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Despite having a hard time falling asleep the first night—we received a late-night video call bemoaning her plight—she had a great time on the trip and returned energized and happy; she was particularly enamored with the story of the true origins of George Washington’s teeth. And, thankfully, she avoided my fate.

One downside of the timing of the D.C. trip was that Julia missed Easter; this distressed her greatly, and she exacted a promise from us that we would stage an Easter egg hunt for her benefit upon her return. On the actual Easter morning, Joe and William were up bright and early, as you might guess, and Joe played the part of big brother to a hilt, watching bemusedly as William raced from hiding place to hiding place shouting, “Egg!” for every treat he found.

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Things have slowed down a bit over the last few weeks, but are primed to pick up again next month. William will be wrapping up preschool in May, and shortly thereafter, the older kids will each be taking separate trips to Disneyland with their respective school bands. This flurry of activity will culminate—unless something takes an unexpected turn—in June with Julia’s eighth grade promotion, which, if I’ve done my math correctly, means that we’ll be parents of a high school student next fall.

Gallery: Fall 2012

Early 2012

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We are headed into Girl Scout cookie season here in San José, which means that our weekends are going to be very fully booked very soon. With that in mind, I took some time this afternoon to go through our deep pile of un-reviewed photos to bring you an astonishing collection of pictures from… early 2012.

That’s right: these Obama-era pictures are pre-middle-school, pre-Brexit, and pre-William, going all the way back to kindergarten for Joe and second grade for Julia. Turns out, the older kids were pretty cute back in the day, and they hadn’t even learned to roll their eyes yet.

Speaking of eye-rolling middle schoolers, Joe has more or less settled in at Willow Glen Middle after a few early bumps in the road. Like Julia before him, he’s taking intermediate band with Ms. Lee and getting a kick out of her vibrant and somewhat unorthodox persona as a teacher. He tried out for jazz band over the summer and didn’t make it—officially, he was told that they didn’t need any more clarinetists—and that got him a little down for a while, but he has a springtime trip to Disneyland to look forward to, where the band will be participating in a contest. I don’t think Joe is as excited about it as Julia was—he’s not really into roller coasters and thrill rides—but being on the road for a few days with his friends and classmates should be an interesting life experience for him, as long as he doesn’t get left behind in a rest stop bathroom.

Speaking of Julia, she finally really seems to have a handle on middle school life, just in time for her to start high school next year. She’s even gone so far as to join two clubs: geography club, and a dungeons and dragons group. I thought about digging up some of my old AD&D character sheets from high school and college, but decided against it; I figure that hearing all about how I used to play the same game thirty years ago is the last thing she wants.

William is cruising through his last few months of preschool before he starts transitional kindergarten next year. Unfortunately, he’s taken to copying his older brother and decrying school as “boring”, but I think he secretly loves it. He will also be starting his first year of t-ball in a few weeks, so we’ll be back to spending Saturdays at the park after a year-long break.

Gallery: Early 2012.

Fall 2011

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Because Joe is starting middle school in about a week, it seemed only appropriate to set the time machine all the way back to Fall 2011, when he was just about to enter kindergarten. In that spirit, we’ve posted a set of pictures from that simpler time.

The gallery covers everything from the kids‘ first day of school to a quick family trip up to Point Reyes and Muir Woods, and ends with my parents’ Thanksgiving visit.

There are quite a few soccer pictures mixed in, as well, and this year was notable for the fact that both kids’ teams actually placed in the season-ending tournament. If I recall correctly (it was six years ago, after all), Julia’s team came in third in her age group, and Joe’s team actually won. Neither of them has been able to replicate that level of success in the years since.

Looking back, it’s darkly funny to remember how worried we were about the kids’ bickering at the time. Little did we know what we were in for in years to come.

Gallery: Fall 2011.