We’ve fallen off the wagon a bit in terms of posting pictures—a busy work schedule combined with the usual plethora of kids’ activities has gotten in the way—but we have a decent-sized batch queued up and nearly ready to go.
Over the last fifteen years or so, we seem to have accidentally fallen into a tradition in which we get together with some of our old college friends every five years: in 2004, we went to Paul and Joanna Williams’s house near Killeen, Texas, and in 2009 we all gathered at Dave and Rebecca Hyatt’s house in The Woodlands. Considering that no fewer than ten children have been born to the various families since the 2004 get-together, invading someone’s home no longer seemed like a viable option for the 2014 shindig. Instead, we decided to rent a house on a beach somewhere, so that no family’s permanent residence was at risk of being utterly destroyed. Naturally, we have pictures.
The place we decided on was called Luck o’ the Irish—charmingly, all of these beach houses seem to have cute names—in Surfside Beach, Texas. We stayed there a full week and had a fantastic time. The house was big enough to accommodate all twenty-one of us comfortably, and there were plenty of spaces for the kids to do their own things while the adults played board games and caught up.
The beach itself was wonderful—really far nicer than we had any reason to expect a beach on the Gulf of Mexico to be given our past experiences. Apparently there was a bumper crop of seaweed in Galveston this year that left some area beaches a foul, smelly mess, but by the time of our visit, the seaweed in Surfside had pretty much dried up, leaving a broad, coarse band between the house and the ocean that was little more than a mild nuisance.
We did see a couple jellyfish drifting around one day, and there was a fierce current that would carry you halfway to Houston if you weren’t diligent, but the water was warm and the surf was vigorous enough to be fun for the kids without being overtly threatening. The kids spent hours and hours swimming in the water and playing in the sand and by extension, the parents did as well: after the first couple days, I had the worst sunburn I can remember having, and I don’t burn easily. I spent the rest of the trip bundled in a swim shirt whenever I went out to the water, with sunscreen slathered on even under the shirt.
When we weren’t down at the beach, the kids were completely content to play on iPads and show off games they’d discovered to one another—if I weren’t already bullish on tablets as a platform before this trip, I certainly would be now. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much in the way of inter-child or cross-family drama. The biggest obstacle we faced was trying to stop William from climbing up the stairs to the upper level of the house. Well, that and the fact that the tap water was more or less non-potable, so we kept making quick trips into town to buy bottled water. It wasn’t until the second-to-last day that we noticed the page in the back of the house’s informational binder that warned that Surfside’s water exceeded the federal government’s maximum safe levels of arsenic. According to the warning, it’s perfectly safe for short exposures, but if we’re all dead in six months, you know what happened.
Before we went to Surfside, we stopped off at my parents’ new-ish house in Georgetown, near Austin, which Julia and Joe were very excited to see for the first time. Having spent much of the summer obsessively watching HGTV, they couldn’t stop talking about the various features of the house, though they did come to the conclusion that it was a little on the small side for us (an easy answer to arrive at, considering that it only has two bedrooms). Nevertheless, they had a great time camping out in Grandma and Grandpa’s spare room and counting golf carts on the roads within the gated community of Sun City.
We were flying out of Austin on our way home, but we had a few hours to kill between the time we had to be out of the house in Surfside and our departure. We decided to take a brief detour into Houston to visit Rice and see some of our old haunts. Thanks to a bit of lucky timing, I even managed to snap a quick picture of Joe outside the room that Joe Shidle and I shared during our senior year, twenty years ago.
They’ve done quite a bit of work on campus over the last couple decades, and naturally, as people who have a strong emotional affinity for the way things were at the time we were there, not all of it is to our liking. Most of that can likely be chalked up to ordinary, everyday antipathy toward change, but I’m genuinely saddened by some elements of the reconfiguration of Baker College, where we and most of our close friends lived. In particular, the formerly gorgeous and understated facade of the building, including the main entrance to the commons, is effectively gone, blocked from view from the inner loop by a massive new residential wing. I’m sure it seems completely natural to students who only know the Baker of today—and it’s definitely a plus if the new wing makes it unnecessary (or at least less necessary) to kick some students off campus for a year the way Joe and I were—but it’s not the way Baker looks in my dreams.
We made it back home just in time to start getting ready for school and all that entails. The kids still talk about the beach house, though, and as I was going through the photos to accompany this post, Julia mentioned that seeing them makes her feel a little bit sad, because she misses the house and her friends. By that measure, at least, the trip seems to have been a success.
We’ve been back in California for a couple months since our trip to Nebraska, and we’ve finally recovered sufficiently from the unexpected detour to Denver to get another set of photos up on the site.
It’s been a pretty hectic couple months. The kids still had a few days off when we got back to California, so Julie took them down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for a day while I was stuck at work. Then, the very next weekend, they started on their winter athletic activities: basketball for Joe and swimming for Julia.
Julia has made great strides in the pool, and she finally passed the complete swimming test, so she can get a green wristband and swim unaccompanied. The hard part for her was convincing herself that she could tread water for a full minute. There wasn’t really any question in my mind whether she could do it, but she had persuaded herself that it was extremely difficult, and was reluctant to try as a result. Now that she’s passed, she is happy as a clam swimming on her own after her lessons while we watch Joe’s basketball games. Being able to swim outside in February is a definite advantage to living in California.
The big news of the last couple months is that William has started eating solid food. Julie noticed that he was keeping a watchful eye on us at mealtimes, so we introduced rice cereal mixed with breast milk the third week of January; he did well enough with that relatively tame starter food that he got to try squash a couple weeks later. In addition to cereal and squash, he’s had avocado, bananas, and carrots so far. Julie has been making her own baby food from fresh fruits and vegetables and freezing portions in ice cube trays, and William has been gobbling up everything we’ve tried. He’ll be ready for popcorn and pizza before we know it.
Rounding out the early part of the year, Julia turned in her first science fair project, an effort to learn which detergents did the best job cleaning oil from various animal hides, and Joe finally got to hang his glow-in-the-dark outer space decorations in his bedroom. He actually had the planets all wrong at first, but we finally convinced him to put them into a rough semblance of order, though the distances between the planets’ orbits still aren’t quite right. His ceiling is quite a sight to behold at bedtime; I actually bought a remote shutter cord for my camera to capture a few photos with really long exposures.
Coming soon: a video or two, William and his bouncer, a visit from my parents, and perhaps a flashback to 2010.
The fact that we have a new-ish baby at home doesn’t change the reality that we are still way behind on the task of going through and posting pictures of our other kids, despite the fact that they are no long producing dirty diapers and drool at the extremely high levels achieved by their younger sibling. It is with this in mind that I am very excited to present a collection of photos from Thanksgiving 2009.
Looking back at these pictures, I am struck by the bountiful feast Julia’s kindergarten class had to celebrate the holiday. There have been years we have had a less impressive spread at home. If you look carefully at the classroom pictures, you’ll note that Julia’s name is next to the green apple; that was a very good day, indeed.
Also, thanks to the kindliness of our former next door neighbor Tom (or, as the kids called him, Mr. Tom), there’s a rare photo of the four of us that actually turned out pretty well.
The set is rounded out by one of our most popular features: a collection of outtakes from our attempt to get a family portrait for Christmas. Things were going so well that Joe opted out of participating in the shoot for an extended period of time. Fortunately, Julia’s Bitty Baby doll was on hand to take his place.
As I hinted in our last update, having a working camera at Christmas allowed us more latitude in terms of taking pictures than we were accustomed to. The end result was hundreds of pictures—most of them not especially good: having a camera is hardly the same thing as knowing how to use one, and our new camera is a fair bit more complicated than the one we had before—to sort through, evaluate, and try to make presentable. Finally, nearly a month later, we’ve uploaded our Christmas album.
The season kicked off with the winter band concert at Booksin. After a year or so of learning the trumpet, things are starting to click for Julia. It helps that we belatedly realized that she has a secret weapon in the form of her mother: not many of her bandmates are lucky enough to have someone who played the same instrument for years and years at home. Rather than having Julia head off to her room to practice on her own, which was never very effective, we’ve taken to having her work one-on-one with Julie for fifteen minutes in the evening, so she’s getting expert, real-time feedback on how she’s doing. She’s showing real improvement, and she seems to be enjoying playing more as a result. She did a great job at the concert, even if she’s a little tough to make out in the photos, hidden behind her friend Zoe’s music stand and a giant saxophonist. The shots in which she’s front and center were taken after the show, when the band director let each group of kids come to the front of the stage for a photo opportunity—he certainly knows his audience.
For the second consecutive year, Joe’s YMCA Adventure Guides circle did an evening trip to Downtown Ice. Joe won’t be competing in short track any time soon, but he had a good time. Unlike last year, we actually met up with the group: I worked from home that afternoon rather than try to fight traffic down from Palo Alto during rush hour. My biggest takeaway by far was that ice skating is really, really painful; my feet are cramping up just thinking about it.
We spent the holidays at Grandma Flack’s house in Nebraska, and we were lucky to be able to see all of Julie’s brothers on Christmas day in Norfolk and later, at David’s place in Malcolm. Julia and Joe eagerly anticipated seeing their cousins, and they didn’t disappoint; Greg was especially patient with them.
One of the other things the kids were looking forward to—perhaps more than anything else—was Grandma Flack’s electric typewriter. They spent some time banging out notes on it the last time we spent Christmas in Nebraska (two years ago for those of you keeping track at home), and it was still fresh in their minds this time around. This year, in addition to assembling personalized missives for each of the adults in the house, they wrote notes for Santa, which we left out on Christmas Eve along with the traditional milk and cookies. Naturally, Santa took a few moments out from his busy night to leave them handwritten replies.
In contrast to the typewriter, one of the kids’ other thrills this year was watching the Doctor Who Christmas special, streamed over the Internet to my iPad, since Grandma Flack’s cable company doesn’t offer BBC America. Interestingly, they didn’t make much of a distinction between these two technologies, separated as they are by a more than a half-century of progress. To them, they were just ordinary things that worked and could more or less be taken for granted; if anything, the fact that the typewriter produced tangible, solid artifices they could hold in their hands made it more interesting than the purely virtual reality of the iPad.1
Of course, It was William’s very first Christmas, though he seemed a bit nonplussed by all the festivities. He spent a significant portion of our stay napping with Aunt Julie, who worked assiduously to find positions for him that might relieve gas pains. Grandma Flack was able to turn up a crib, swing, bouncy seat, and a playmat that was nearly identical to the one we have here in San José, so William felt right at home, as evidenced by the fact, he felt comfortable enough to maintain his policy of not sleeping for more than two hours straight.
He even did reasonably well on the flights to and from Nebraska. We didn’t have a seat for him, so he spent the entirety of his time on the plane on our laps, but he didn’t fuss much at all in the grand scheme of things. We flew Southwest, which doesn’t have assigned seats, so he actually served as an effective good-luck charm on the way out to Nebraska: I held him on my lap throughout the boarding process, and no one elected to sit next to me.
Flying Southwest had one other benefit: unlike most other airlines, they still don’t charge for your first checked bag, and we were able to take advantage of that policy to help us get the kids’ gifts (of which there were many: every year, we vow not to let things get too out of hand, and every year, we fail) back to California without having to spend too much on shipping. This year, we got away with just sending one large box via FedEx; everything else came on the plane with us.
While we were in Nebraska, Julia also started work on her very first science fair project. She did an experiment judging the effectiveness of different types of detergent in removing oil from feathers, chamois, and rabbit fur (being in the Midwest, rather than California, ensured that we wouldn’t have any problem acquiring whatever animal products we needed to conduct the experiments). Julia didn’t have to present her work or be judged this time around, but she enjoyed putting together her poster—which was covered in stickers, naturally—and testing her hypothesis. Going down to Champaign for the state science fair in the seventh grade is one of my favorite childhood memories, so I’m looking forward to even more exciting projects down the road.
Seating aside, the actual travel portion of the trip was more eventful than usual this year. I had forgotten how much fun it is to get through airport security with a stroller and an infant. Luckily, Julia and Joseph are both old enough to get through the process more or less independently, but I pity the poor, unfortunate souls who ended up behind us in the security line, especially now that the slower, hold-your-hands-in-the-air naked-picture machines have largely replaced metal detectors in the airports we travel through.
Making things even more exciting was the fact that Mother Nature was being extremely uncooperative while we were trying to get from place to place. While we were actually in Nebraska, the weather was fairly pleasant: a couple of times, it even got up into the 50s and 60s, warm enough for the kids to go outside and play with some of their new toys. But the visit was bookended by some absolutely brutal weather. Our outbound flight was delayed by almost three hours due to precipitation elsewhere in the country, long enough that we had to call ahead to make special arrangements with the rental car company so that we would have a way to get to Norfolk upon our arrival.
On the day we headed back to California, the temperature dropped to around zero, and the wind chill was unspeakably low. Our flight to Denver was delayed by more than four hours, and we missed our connection to San José completely. Fortunately, Julie was able to make last-minute hotel arrangements while we waited, and we spent the night in a cozy little room close to the airport. The kids (other than William, who didn’t seem to have an opinion) thought it was a grand adventure, while I was mostly worried about missing a day of work.
As an aside, that progress could grind to a screeching halt if the big telecommunications companies get their way on net neutrality. I’m probably biased, seeing as I make my living in the tech industry, but the open Internet has done more to drive innovation over the last twenty years than just about any technology, and companies like AT&T and Verizon are trying to kill it out of avarice. We probably shouldn’t let them. ↩
We took a ton of pictures during our trip to Nebraska for the holidays—more than 400 of them—so it’s taking some time to sort through them all, especially since I’m anal-retentive about making sure each and every photograph is tagged with the location it was taken and the names of the people it contains. Come to think of it, this compulsion might be why we’re still posting pictures from 2009.
With that in mind, we’re breaking with tradition and posting our Christmas video before the associated pictures. As usual, you can view the web version of the movie using the link above, or you can download the much larger high-definition version.
We’ve uploaded another set of pictures of covering William’s first month or so at home. We were very fortunate to have Grandma Flack and Grandma and Grandpa Wong with us during these intense first few weeks: they were a tremendous help as we re-adjusted to having a newborn around, and they made it much easier for Julia and Joseph to get used to having a younger sibling siphoning most of our attention away from them.
So far, the older kids are coping pretty well with William’s presence. Julia loves helping out with him, and has been very gracious about sharing her room during late-night diaper changes and the occasional afternoon nap. Joe seems to be a bit more affected, but is holding up well overall. He’s regressed a bit in some ways—for example, we’ve caught him sucking his thumb a few times, a habit he had finally kicked over the summer—and he’s sometimes just a bit awkward and overzealous in his interactions with the baby, but there aren’t any signs of real jealousy.
So far, William has been a pretty well-behaved baby. He gets a bit cranky in the afternoon and evening, largely because he’s tired: for whatever reason, he has a hard time taking a nap except in the morning, right after I take Julia and Joe to school, so by the time evening rolls around, he’s usually pretty unhappy. On the plus side, once he gets to sleep at night, he’s usually good for two or three solid hours at a time, and he doesn’t require a great deal of convincing to go back to bed after nursing. He particularly likes to rest in his swing; in fact, last night he slept there for six hours straight from 7:30 until 2:30 in the morning. Unfortunately, Julie and I weren’t able to go to bed because we didn’t want to leave him alone in the kitchen, but hopefully it was a sign of more restful nights to come.
Summer has wound down here in San José. The kids are back in school—classes started on August 14—and soccer should be starting up any day now. To celebrate, we’ve posted a set of photos covering the last few weeks of summer and the first day of school.
In the set, you’ll find some pictures of the kids at a couple different summer reading program events run by the San José Public Library. They decided to mix things up this year by requiring kids to participate in on-site activities to win prizes. As a result, the end of July was a flurry of visits to different library branches to fulfill the program requirements. One was more or less a giant Lego party which, naturally, thrilled Joe immensely; another was a performance by Dan Chan Magic Man. Julia managed to get herself chosen as a volunteer during the latter and, somewhat predictably, was a ham on onstage. She’s a fascinating bundle of contradictions: one day she’s spontaneously clowning around for an audience of strangers, and the next she’s refusing to give her well-rehearsed book report in front of a classroom full of friends.
As usual, we learned of the kids’ classroom assignments a couple days before the start of the school year. Julia is in Mrs. Whittell’s class, which is in the newer wing of the school, near the library. She switches over to Mrs. Compton-Kolda’s class next door for science and non-fiction reading; I’m not sure what the actual rationale for this approach is, but if nothing else, it’s an early preview of middle school for the kids. She’s quite excited to have a Trapper Keeper this year; I was surprised to learn that they still made them.
Joe gets two teachers this year: Mrs. Olson is teaching his class Monday through Thursday, and Mrs. Vandeneynde is covering Fridays. Luckily for both teachers, the school has wisely elected to continue avoiding putting Joe and his buddy Mason in the same classroom. That said, he still has a number of friends from kindergarten and first grade in his class this year.
As of this writing, we’re just about a month out from Julie’s expected due date, and we’re continuing to make slow progress on preparing for the baby’s arrival. Julie’s office gave her a new car seat and stroller, and we’re working on unloading the old stroller on Craigslist to make room in our packed garage. My jobs this weekend are to install the car seat in the van and see if I can figure out how to reattach the drop side on Joe’s old crib. We’re also planning to rearrange the furniture in Julia’s room a bit to accommodate the crib and a changing table, but Julia hasn’t signed off on that plan yet. I’m sure that will be an interesting conversation.
It’s a good thing that we still have a month to get ready, because Julie has been feeling pretty under the weather lately. She picked up a cold from Joe a couple of weeks ago—he has an unfortunate habit of drinking out of her water glass throughout the day—and the nagging cough that resulted developed into bronchitis. That’s being treated with an inhaler and antibiotics, but late Tuesday night, just after taking the antibiotics for the first time, she started feeling a sharp pain in her side and back. Fearing that she or the baby might be having an adverse reaction to the medication, she dashed off to the emergency room. The verdict: kidney stones.
She came home with a prescription for some nice, strong painkillers that made it dangerous for her to drive, so I took off from work early on Wednesday to pick up the kids from school. Then, on Friday, she suffered another attack, and this time the pain medication didn’t help. A trip to the urgent care clinic followed, where she was given an injection that again left her unable to drive. I left work early once more to pick her up from the doctor’s office—I actually had to sign discharge papers promising not to let her operate heavy equipment—and Tammy Riggioni, the mother of one of Joe’s friends, picked them up at school.
Fortunately, this was Julie’s last full week at work, so we’re hopeful she’ll have an opportunity to rest and recuperate in the coming weeks.
On a more positive note, Joe has suddenly decided to take giving up his longstanding thumb-sucking habit more seriously. If he makes it through the weekend, it’ll have been a week, and Julie and I are now faced with the frightening prospect of making good on the various incentives we offered to get him to stop. In fact, he’s so confident that he’s going to make it that he’s begun trying to renegotiate the reward for making it through a month: whereas before he wanted Minecraft, he now decided that he really wants New Super Marios Bros. 2 (the “New” is apparently part of the name) and a Nintendo 3DS to play it on. Suffice it to say that discussions are ongoing.
Sunday was a pretty momentous day for us here on Harmil Way, even when you take into account our diminished standards. After a year or so of preparation, Joe finally moved into his own room with an actual full-size bed. Naturally, there are pictures.
At Joe’s request, the room is decorated with a space motif, complete with space linens, space bedspread, space lamp, space pillow (which Joe calls “1-2-3, Yay!”) and glow-in-the-dark space wall decals that we haven’t applied yet. The space theme also dictated the color of the walls: blue and orange. According to Joe, this color scheme is required to capture the essence of traveling through space. Both colors ended up being a bit stronger on the walls than they appeared in the store; I take solace in the fact that, with luck, I will not be responsible for painting over them.
Our cleanup efforts were not limited to painting. Julie rented a Rug Doctor and gave the carpet a thorough cleaning: in all the years the room had been used as a spare bedroom and, later, an office, the only member of the family who paid much attention to the carpet was Maggie, and her standards of care were shockingly low. After a few cleansing passes with Nature’s Miracle and the steam cleaner, the carpet is in much better shape. Long term, it’s still in need of replacement, but it’s no longer completely appalling.
We did encounter one significant wrinkle during the rehabilitation of the room, however. As we were washing the walls in preparation for painting them, I went to work scrubbing the baseboards as well, thinking that we’d touch them up. Things were going along swimmingly until my thumb actually went through the wood. It appears that Joe’s room, at least, is infested with termites; further inspection revealed more baseboard damage, as well as an actual termite who poked his head out of the damaged wood. He’s dead now.
Obviously, we will need to do something to address this issue. We’re not yet sure of the scope of the problem, so we don’t know if it can be treated locally in and under Joe’s room, or whether we’ll need to have the whole house tented. Complicating matters is the fact that Julie’s online research on the effects of termite mitigation on pregnant women and fetuses revealed that some studies have found a increase in brain tumors among children who experienced prenatal exposure to the kinds of pesticides used to kill termites. With that in mind, we’ll likely leave things alone for the next couple months and figure out what to do after the baby is born. Hopefully the house isn’t reduced to sawdust by the end of September.
Turning our attention back to the halcyon days of 2009, here’s a set of photos highlighting my mom’s 65th birthday. For the occasion, my dad arranged for the two of them to travel to San José, and for Bill and Leah to fly in from Colorado Springs. For some reason, Joe spent part of the visit dressed up in one of Julia’s old Disney Princess outfits; we’ll need to keep those pictures handy in case he steps out of line as a teenager.
In other exciting news, Julia hit a big milestone yesterday: she went with Julie to Nordstrom to be sized for her very first training bra. Needless to say, she was extremely excited to take this step, and throughout the afternoon, she happily switched among the three bras she brought home. For the first hour or so, she complained a bit that it was uncomfortable, but by the end of the day, she hardly noticed it was there. For obvious reasons, we’re not posting pictures.
On the topic of training, we finally took the training wheels off of Joe’s bike a couple weeks ago. All things considered, he’s doing pretty well. He was up and balancing on his own a few tries after the wheels came off (though he certainly had plenty of practice with them on). We’re still trying to work out the kinks around turning—so far, we’ve only gone around the block counter-clockwise—but he will definitely be speeding around the neighborhood by himself by the end of the summer.
Occasional Dispatches from San Jose 
