Category Archives: School

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.

Spring and Summer 2015

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It’s Super Bowl Sunday here in the Bay Area, and rather than fight the insane traffic it’s causing, I decided to stay in and post pictures. Actually, because we’re so far behind, posting an album is on my to-do list pretty much every weekend, but circumstances often get in the way.

This set of pictures is relatively recent, dating back to the Spring and Summer of 2015. It covers Easter (William’s first as an active participant), the spring band concert at Booksin, Joe’s ninth birthday, Julia’s fifth grade promotion ceremony, and a trip to Great America with Angelisa, one of Julia’s friends from school, which Julia won for being one of the top sellers of Girl Scout cookies last February.

The promotion ceremony was brief but poignant. I don’t remember having anything of the kind when I finished elementary school, but I’m certain I would have enjoyed it. And, mercifully, it was much more temperate than the last graduation ceremony I attended, which was in Houston in May.

The trip to Great America was the first time we’d taken the kids to a proper amusement park, and despite some initial trepidation—especially from Joe—they had a great time. Julia and Angelisa were braver than I was at their age, hitting most of the roller coasters in the park that weren’t completely insane, while Joe’s enthusiasm was a bit more tempered by a healthy fear of perishing in a catastrophic failure of the park’s safety systems.

This was my first visit to the California version of Great America, as well (though I remember seeing it from our hotel or the highway during our family’s visit way back in 1982). Having been to the larger one in Illinois many times, it was strange to see a mix of familiar and unfamiliar sites. The two parks have been completely separate entities for years, but a number of rides, like the main carousel, log ride, bumper cars, and Sky Trek tower (called the Star Tower out here) are more or less identical. The vague sense of familiarity mixed with novelty made me feel at once young and old.

Gallery: Spring and Summer 2015.

Summer 2011

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Things have been hectic this fall: soccer has been in full swing; the kids have been busy with schoolwork; and I’ve taken two business trips and gone camping with Joe’s Adventure Guides circle. Hopefully things will slow down for a bit—just in time for us to careen headlong into the holidays. Here’s a small collection of previously un-posted photos from the summer of 2011 that I wanted to get online before working on the next batch of more recent pictures.

After much back-and-forth between Blue Shield of California and the Center for Speech, Language and Occupational Therapy, William has finally started speech therapy. He’s doing two 30–minute sessions each week and seems to be taking to it pretty well. They’ve started him off with some simple sentences that are of direct value to him, such as ”I want milk,” and it seems to be working in that he’s talking a bit more around the house. He still uses single-word imperatives most of the time—“up”, “down”, “house”, etc.—but his vocabulary is definitely growing; sometime this last week, he started to say “toast”, which he pronounces as “oash” and uses for everything from english muffins to frozen waffles.

Joe started wearing orthodontic headgear this weekend, and he is none too happy about it. Fortunately, he only has to wear it at night, so there’s no social component to his disdain—he just finds it uncomfortable. I’m sure he’ll get used to it soon; the good news is that if this goes well, he stands a good chance of avoiding the need for braces, which would be a minor miracle considering how hard he found it to give up sucking his thumb. It would also be a lucky break for our finances, considering the fact that it seems likely that Julia will be having work done nearly though the end of the decade.

Speaking of Julia, she continues to adapt to junior high—or, as they call it out here, middle school. She’s having a great time walking and biking to school each day with her friends and genuinely seems to be enjoying her classes. There have been a few hiccups both academically and socially, but I‘m optimistic she just needs to calibrate her mindset to the different level of expectations in this new context.

Gallery: Summer 2011.

Julia’s Sixth Grade Picture

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In lieu of a larger post—one is forthcoming—we’ve uploaded Julia’s latest school picture, her first in middle school. This year’s photo is shown here, and you can find all of them going back to kindergarten by following the link below.

Note that Julia is wearing her school uniform in the portrait: she was given the rare opportunity to wear any top she wanted (provided it wasn’t one of the banned gang colors), but demurred.

Sixth Grade

Gallery: Julia’s Class Pictures.

Early 2015

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We’re well into the second half of the year, so it seemed as good a time as any (other than few months ago, which I concede probably would have been better) to put up some pictures from the first few months of 2015. This set contains a trim and tidy 187 photos, down from more than 600 originals, so it’s probably a good thing that I exercised a modicum of editorial control rather than dumping the whole pile online; this way, you get slightly fewer underexposed shots of my shoes.

The first part of the album contains a number of pictures of Julia hard at work on her fifth grade science fair project, in which she measured the effect of weight on the distance traveled by a Pinewood Derby car. As I mentioned in an earlier post, she earned perfect marks for this project thanks to her hard work, some of which is very evident in the pictures. I’m not sure whether they’ll be doing science fair projects in middle school, but we’re not off the hook, regardless: as a fourth grader, it’s Joe’s turn now. Does anybody have some good project ideas?

Girl Scout activities also feature quite prominently in this collection, as Julia and Julie were both very involved in scouting this spring. The troop went geocaching in a county park—a hobby that seems to have been trivialized a bit by virtue of the fact that nearly everyone carries a phone with a built–in GPS receiver nowadays. Julia had a lot of fun, right up to the part where she tumbled down a hill and into a creek, holding onto Julie’s phone the entire time. The girls also visited the Hiller Aviation Museum, where they simulated crashing planes during takeoff, landing, and pretty much every other phase of flight; dissected bird pellets; and took part in a cleanup day at a local park.

Julia also had her braces removed this February, a much-anticipated and eagerly awaited event. She celebrated with what she and Julie termed a “candy extravaganza” and showed off some of the biggest smiles we’ve seen from her in recent years. Unfortunately, according to her orthodontist, she’s going to need some more work in a year or two once her jaw is finished growing, but we’ll worry about that when the time comes—for now, Julia is enjoying her newfound freedom to drink pop and eat gummy bears.

In other orthodontic news, Joe had an expander put in last week, so he’s been drooling profusely and making strange slurping sounds whenever food gets stuck in it for the last few days; I’m sure he’s very popular at lunchtime at school. The expander is there to correct a minor crossbite by pushing his upper teeth farther apart. Each night, we get to use a tiny allen wrench to turn a ratchet and increase the width of the device by ⅛ mm.; it’s like a tiny medieval torture device on the roof of his mouth. If all goes well, however—and he can stay on the straight and narrow with respect to his thumb–sucking habit—this may be the only intervention he needs, meaning that he won’t have to have actual braces. That would be a great outcome, but in the meantime, we’re stuck with another set of dietary restrictions

William remains adorable. He’s still not talking nearly as much as we’d like, and we’re in the process of getting him started in speech therapy on the recommendation of Dr. Kim. Or, I should say, we’re trying to get him started: the recommendation actually came in around his eighteen-month checkup, but thanks to a spectacular collision among multiple slow–moving, easily befuddled bureaucracies, we are just now getting to the point where his initial appointment is in sight. The good news is that his evaluation indicated that his comprehension is easily at or above the norm for toddlers his age, so he understands what’s going on around him. He’s just not ready to talk about it yet.

Julia turned eleven last month, and we’ll get pictures of the limited festivities up soon. This year, she got one primary (and expensive) gift: tickets to a Taylor Swift concert at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. She and Julie went to the show together and had a great time: Julia has been listening to Swift’s album, 1989 non–stop ever since.

Gallery: Early 2015.

Spring 2011

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As part of our continuing series of posts with pictures from the ancient past, here’s a collection from Spring 2011.

Summer vacation is winding down for the kids—school starts midway through the second week of August—and we’re busy getting ready for the new school year. Julie and Julia spent yesterday shopping for school uniforms, which was surprisingly time-consuming given the limited amount of choice you’re afforded. Joe has his school supply list, so everyone will probably spend some quality time at Target this week stocking up on pens, spiral notebooks, Kleenex™, and the like.

Both kids are looking to the new school year with a mix of anticipation, trepidation, and fear. For my part, I’ve shared their sense of pain, anguish, and hopelessness by spending the better part of the last few days trying to install Windows 10 on our home PC. All told, it’s been a fantastic reminder of why I use Macs. For example, consider this paraphrased exchange with the helpful support technician I spoke to after three+ hours of waiting this morning.

Microsoft: Your PC is part of a domain, so we need $500 to help you.

Me: And if I remove the computer from the domain?

Microsoft: That’s free, but you have to wait another three hours on hold.

Me: sigh

On a somewhat happier note, Julia and Joe just got back from a week at Camp Campbell. This was Julia’s first stay that wasn’t planned ahead of time to coincide with her friends’, and it was Joe’s first visit without me. Julia had a great time: she got to stay in the rustic 49er cabins instead of the resort-like Treetop cabins, and she did a great job of making new friends and trying new things. She particularly enjoyed the climbing wall—she chose that as one of her activities almost every day—so we’ll have to try that on our own someday.

We think Joe had fun at times, but he continues to be plagued by his inability to cope with adversity without throwing a fit. Twice, he ran off from activities and had to be chased down by a counselor, which resulted in us being on the receiving end of awkward phone calls from camp. He did seem to settle down a bit in the second half of the week: by Wednesday, we were convinced we were going to get a call letting us know that we needed to take him home early, but the the call never came. Nevertheless, this remains something we need to continue working on, because it’s sucking the enjoyment out of all of Joe’s activities and is going to cause some real problems down the road—possibly as soon as later this month, when school starts.

Gallery: Spring 2011.

Class Pictures

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We’ve updated Julia and Joe’s school picture galleries to include their class photos from this past year. Interestingly, Julia’s teacher, Mrs. Kammann, left Booksin for another school at the end of the year. That makes four teachers that have been driven to make a career change immediately after having our kids in their classes. And if you count teachers who left within a couple years of exposure to Julia or Joe, the number increases to seven. I’m not sure how to interpret this data, but it seems as though drawing the assignment to teach one of our kids might be hazardous to one’s career prospects.

As an aside, I just noticed that I’m not able to locate the kids’ class pictures for the year before last. Either they both managed to miss school that day, or the photos have been lost in the chaos that is our home. We’ll do our best to track them down.