Category Archives: Pets

William Turns Two / Fall 2015

Posted on by

This set of photos is a time warp back to eight years ago and the fall of 2015, when William turned two. Julia and Joe were still in middle school and elementary school, respectively, and William was living a the carefree life of a toddler.

Looking back on these photos, it’s hard to believe that Joe was almost a year younger than William is now: he seemed like such a big kid at the time. Even at that age, it was clear how much William looked up to him, as evidenced by the pictures of them practicing their instruments together.

For his birthday, William had an amazing train cake that the older kids helped decorate (and eat). He was thrilled to receive a pile of colorful new presents, but as usual, he was completely content just playing in the dirt on the sidelines at Julia’s soccer games.

Gallery: William Turns Two / Fall 2015

Late Spring 2014—William Eats

Posted on by

It’s almost Thanksgiving, so it seemed like the perfect time to post some pictures from, well, eight and a half years ago! This album features snapshots from May and June of 2014, when William was not quite one and Julia and Joseph were still in elementary school.

It includes some pictures from a fun YMCA Adventure Guides outing in which the boys launched homemade rockets; there’s even a video of Joe launching and chasing after the rocket he designed. It also features some photos of Julia napping with Felix; little did we know at the time that this would become a pervasive, recurring theme in our lives.

But the majority of the pictures focus on William’s trials and tribulations trying to maneuver finger food—in this case, Gerber Puffs—into his mouth. As you can see from the photos, he’s making a valiant, two-fisted effort at it, but his tiny fingers aren’t fully on board with the plan. He does eventually succeed, but it’s not immediately clear that the caloric value of the puffs he ate made up for the energy he expended consuming them.

The whole series reminds me of a much older sequence of pictures showing Julia attempting the same feat with Cheerios. Unfortunately, that photo album has vanished from the Internet for the time being, but here’s one sample:

Julia eating Cheerios

And here’s the more recent equivalent:

William eating puffs

The gallery closes with some pictures of William at dinner in a stunningly stylish outfit that’s even older than these photos. Somewhere out there, there are surely pictures of me in the same getup, but unfortunately, I don’t have any to share at this time.

Gallery: Late Spring 2014—William Eats

Fall 2014

Posted on by

Only a few months behind schedule, here are a bunch of photos taken during fall 2014—that’s right, just last year. Most of the pictures are from soccer, with a few other snapshots thrown in for good measure.

Julia had the same coach, Jim Dueltgen—father of Phoebe and Zoe—as last year, and she had a great time playing with a bunch of other girls from Booksin. This was the first year the girls were playing in a U12 (under 12) league, so they were largely smaller and less experienced than the other teams they played against; in fact, Julia was still eligible to play in U10, but she opted to play up a level to stay with her friends. The team hung together through some ugly losses early in the season and put together a nice string of games at the end (albeit after the customary league–wide rebalancing halfway through to make things more competitive) to wrap things up. In the end, they were in a position to earn a trophy on the last day of the season–ending tournament, but things just didn’t go their way. Julia was disappointed, but she is already looking forward to next year—after some of the soccer–related drama we’ve had in the past, it was nice to hear her express that sentiment.

Joe also moved up a level, to U10, so he was often the smallest kid on the pitch. His team was very strong all year—if I recall correctly, they only lost one game during the regular season—so expectations were high going into the tournament. Unfortunately, the wheels more or less came off the wagon during the tournament weekend, and they ended up losing all three of their matches. Joe showed good improvement throughout the year, and mostly brought a positive attitude and healthy outlook, with only a couple of episodes of the pouting that has plagued him in his other endeavors over the last few months.

William loves being outside, so soccer season wasn’t any great hardship for him; we just had to make sure that he didn’t run onto the field when he saw the bigger kids chasing the ball around. He did get bonked on the head by an errant kick at one point, but by and large, he was happy sitting on the sidelines, playing with the equipment, and making friends with dogs.

In fact, the first time I personally saw him walking well was the morning of October 14, while we watched Joe’s team warming up for their game. I managed to capture the moment on video, which I’ll try to post sometime soon.

Gallery: Fall 2014.

Joe’s Room

Posted on by

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.

Meet Stanley

Posted on by

In case adopting Felix and Honey wasn’t sufficiently crazy, we decided to up the ante by adding yet another cat into our home.

Meet Stanley (his pictures are at the end of the album). He’s a three or four year old Ragdoll who was having a little trouble finding a home: Stanley has asthma and requires daily medication, which makes adoption a bit of a long shot. Julie had gone to see some kittens at a foster home for 13th Street Cat Rescue and ended up getting acquainted with Stanley instead. In fact, she spent more than two hours visiting with him and was thoroughly smitten by the time she left.

In the days that followed, we ended up getting Honey and Felix—the kids weren’t going to be denied their kittens—but Julie never gave up on Stanley. She reminded me of Ogra, a cat we saw a few times at pet stores before we were married, back in Champaign in 1998; we never seriously considered getting her because of Maggie’s highly developed sense of territory, but Julie pointed out that she still remembered her, some fifteen years later, and that it would be the same thing with Stanley if we didn’t adopt him. I found it difficult to refute that logic. By the time we called the foster home back about Stanley, the woman caring for him said that she was surprised she hadn’t heard from us sooner, given the degree to which Julie and Stanley had bonded.

As an aside, everything worked out fine with Ogra: sometime after we moved to California, spurred by Julie’s fears that something terrible had happened, I called the rescue organization back in Champaign to check up on her. She had been adopted by a nice family and was, as far as they knew, happy and healthy.

Stanley is on Flovent, which he takes through an inhaler once or twice a day. He’s not especially fond of it—we have to press the inhaler to his muzzle and hold it there for twenty seconds, which makes him a bit squirmy—but he tolerates it reasonably well. His reaction is consistent with what seems to be his overall personality: extraordinarily mellow. He spends most of his time hanging out in the back of the house, sleeping in our bed or Julia’s. He doesn’t seem to mind the kittens at all; if anything, he might be a little intimidated by their energy. I’ve never seen him move faster than a slow amble, and he almost has a slight tendency to waddle.

Felix and Honey, on the other hand, have had slightly stronger reactions. Both of them were pretty unnerved when he first arrived, despite the fact that we kept him confined to the back bathroom for the better part of his first day here to help them acclimate to one another. Over the last few days, Felix seems to have adjusted fairly well: I’ve caught him following Stanley around, trying to sniff his tail, on more than one occasion. Honey, however, still hisses when she comes face to face with him, which isn’t too much of a problem except when everyone is back in our bedroom getting ready for bed. There hasn’t been any bloodshed yet, so I’m hopeful that everyone will figure out how to get along in time.

Felix and Honey

Posted on by

We’re back from an exciting trip to Chicago for Christmas, and naturally we have pictures to share and tales to tell. For now, however, the news of the day is that we’re cat owners once again.

It seems like just a couple weeks ago that we said goodbye to Maggie, but to my surprise—I had to look back at old photos to check—it’s been five months. Before Maggie died, Julie mentioned to the kids that we might think about getting kittens sometime after she was gone, the idea being that Maggie was too old to deal with energetic youngsters looking to romp and play (and she was never big on company to begin with, if we’re being completely honest about the old girl). As a result, both Julia and Joseph looked at Maggie’s illness and eventual death with a strange mix of curiosity, sadness and anticipation, with the last of those feelings unnervingly dominant. From their perspective, they never really knew Maggie in the prime of her life, when she chased about the house snarling at Loaf and chattering at birds; nor did they know her when she was a kitten, always more than willing to distract Julie and me from our homework back at Rice.

As an aside, one of my favorite memories of the last few weeks of Maggie’s life was when I enticed her—with no small amount of effort—to play an old game in which I teased her with a pen hiding under a sheet of paper, just the way we used to back in Baker. It only lasted a few minutes, but everything about it, from the way she held her paw, poised to strike, to the tilt of her head, was just the way I remembered it.

The kids, then, have been growing more and more excited about the idea of kittens. The earlier, vague conversations about doing something after Maggie died became more concrete, with Julie eventually landing on a schedule that called for us to adopt kittens right after the holidays. She wasn’t kidding around, either: we arrived back in San José on Monday, she and the kids started visiting cats on Tuesday, and we had new housemates on Saturday.

Our new friends are Honey and Felix. Naturally, we have pictures. They’re a brother and sister pair from a litter of six kittens that was left at a shelter to be adopted out or euthanized. Luckily, the folks at Unconditional Love Animal Rescue bailed them out. Honey and Felix were the smallest of the bunch by a wide margin, so they were separated from the rest and sent to a foster home together. They’re about nine weeks old, but they’re still pretty small and still very much kittens.

Unsurprisingly, they were a bit nervous when Julie and the kids first brought them home. We weren’t sure how they would react to the house or the kids; nor were we sure how they’d do with respect to the litter box, so we penned them up in the front bathroom with a baby gate on their arrival. We expected to keep them there for a day or two to help them acclimate, but Honey scaled the gate and escaped within the first few hours, and that was that. They spent the night in bed with Julie and me and managed to avoid being crushed, so they seem to be blessed with decent survival instincts.

Julia and Joe are positively ecstatic. Julia loves picking up Felix and carrying him around, whether he wants to be carried or not; Felix has been surprisingly tolerant of this new treatment. Both cats love to play, and they’ve been exceedingly accommodating of Joe’s particular style, which involves swinging a stuffed snake in the general direction of their faces in the hope that they’ll jump up and grab it.