Category Archives: School

Christmas 2014

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Here at long last are our photos from Christmas of last year. I feel like I should have a few amusing anecdotes to share, but it’s been so long, and the intervening months have been so hectic, that I can barely remember what was happening last December.

There was a band concert—I remember that much. Joe was on better behavior in band during the spring semester, so he actually got to play with the advanced band this time. We’re definitely not out of the woods on that front yet, however: he continues to have intermittent (actually, that might be overly generous) problems managing his frustration when things don’t go just right, whether he’s having trouble with his clarinet, working on math problems, or playing baseball.

After Christmas proper, our college friend Mason swung through town with his wife Kathy and his kids Dylan and Ava. Joe and Dylan really clicked at our Rice get-together last summer in Texas, so Joe was really excited to see him again so soon. Dylan even asked his dad to buy a bag of barbecue potato chips to share with Joe on the way into town; if that’s not a real friend, I don’t know what is.

The Harts crashed at our place for the night, and we headed down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium the next day. The aquarium has added a number of computerized, interactive activities, so the kids were enthralled. They even seemed to enjoy the fish, as well.

Gallery: Christmas 2014.

Spring School Pictures

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We’ve updated Julia’s class pictures page with this year’s spring portrait, fake background and all. Note that I said we updated Julia’s page, not the kids’ pages, because Joe, true to form, forgot his payment envelope on picture day and therefore didn’t have his picture taken.

It’s been a busy spring, with Girl Scouts, baseball, BESCA, and other activities taking significant amounts of time. As a result, we have a big backlog of pictures that I’m hoping to work through soon.

Early 2011

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We expect to have more recent pictures to post in a few days, but I wanted to kick things off with a set of photos we’ve had lying around since early 2011.

Julia received a perfect score on her science fair project, which I think was well–deserved considering the amount of effort she put into it. As a reward, we took the kids to the Winchester Mystery House for the first time and followed that up with dinner out and ice cream. I had the honor and privilege of carrying William through the tour, because he decided he didn’t want to ride in the Baby Bjorn, and most of the time he made it quite clear that he really wanted Julie to hold him, but everyone made it through intact.

Both kids have been spending a great deal of time learning to program at /code over the past few weeks—possibly in part because I (perhaps foolishly) decreed that time spent there wouldn’t count against their small daily allotment of screen time. The tutorials offered there are remarkable in terms of their accessibility and breadth, and Julia and Joe have picked up quite a bit very quickly. I’m hoping I can start bringing my work home and have them do it for me.

Gallery: Early 2011.

Halloween & Thanksgiving 2010

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Happy 2015! To celebrate the new year, we’re posting our very last retro–photo update from 2010. This collection covers Halloween and Thanksgiving, plus a bit extra in the form of a few snapshots from Julia’s first grade Christmas party. There are still some videos to work on, but this should be it for pictures, I hope.

That halloween, we took the kids to Uesugi Farms in Morgan Hill to pick out a pumpkin, which was miles beyond the level of effort we normally put in. There were hayrides, ponies, carousels, multiple trains, and thousands and thousands of pumpkins. It’s a little hard to tell from the photos, but there had been a tremendous amount of rain in the days leading up to our visit, so much of the farm, including the parking lot, was basically mud. This made it a little challenging to get everyone back into the van without wrecking the upholstery, but we managed to make it without completely overwhelming my compulsive tendencies (there may have been sulking involved, however).

The kids were both Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that year. For reasons I don’t recall, they developed a brief fascination with them around that time without ever having seen any of the films or television shows or having read the original source material. They did have a picture book or two that featured the characters, but that’s just about the extent of their exposure, apart from the influence of friends. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this probably near the beginning of the end of our ability to exert complete control over what both of them were exposed to.

Gallery: Halloween & Thanksgiving 2010.

Fall 2010

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Moving right along, here’s another set of pictures, this one from fall 2010. Though a bit smaller than the last batch, this set covers broad ground.

For Joe, it includes his first day of real school in Junior K and his first soccer team, which some might argue wasn’t actually a team, per se, because they didn’t play games against other teams, but the kids had tons of fun regardless.

It also covers Julia’s second season of soccer, which reunited her with Molly Gosling, whom she knew literally from infancy, since Julie and Molly’s mother were in the same Las Madres group; the first grade field trip to Pizza My Heart, which seems to have had dubious educational value, but would probably rank at the top of her list of favorite field trips to date; and her trip to a Sharks game with her teacher, Mrs. Peters, which she won in a drawing at the Booksin Walkathon. She still remembers that trip as well, and when it comes up, she rarely fails to remind me that the Sharks beat the Blackhawks that evening.

Note that the pictures in this set come from a variety of sources: some were taken with my old phone; some are scans of prints; and some were taken by other parents and sent out in compressed form via email. As a result, the quality is a bit uneven.

Gallery: Fall 2010.

These Aren’t the Pics You’re Looking For (Spring and Summer 2010)

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I realize that our readership (by which I mean: grandparents) is probably vastly more interested in photos and a blow–by–blow (in some cases, literally) description of what transpired over the holidays here in San José this year, but there’s an really good reason they’re not ready: they’re not over yet. In fact, I have the week between Christmas and New Year’s more or less off this year, so there should be plenty of opportunities to shoot more pictures and video and, if previous years’ patterns hold, get them posted sometime in August.

In the meantime, we’ve had a giant pile of pictures from spring and summer 2010 sitting around, un–sorted, un–reviewed, and un–published for the last four years. This is my attempt to rectify that oversight. Note that while this may seem like a ton of photos to drop on you all at once, rest assured that these constitute less than half of the original set: believe it or not, this is a carefully curated selection.

There was a lot going on that year, including Joe’s fourth birthday and his first ride on the Junior K bus, but in going through the pictures, one particular memory jumped out at me: the ceremonial walk around the field at at San José Giants game for the kids in the Fearless Baseball program at Primary Plus. The march itself was unremarkable—just a bunch of kids in baseball uniforms wandering around a minor league ballfield, albeit with some classic Mason–and–Joe horseplay—but, following on the heels of her legendary meltdown at PAL soccer night at the San José Earthquakes, it did feature Julia expressing what can only be described as unbridled terror at being confronted by a large crowd (and probably mascots), even with Julie there to hold her hand. As we face down various manifestations of her forceful personality going into adolescence, it’s helpful to remember that it wasn’t so long ago that she was just a scared little girl who wanted her mommy.

Gallery: Spring & Summer 2010.

School Pictures and Pediculus humanus capitis

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It’s been a busy couple weeks here in San José since our last post: the kids did their annual school walkathon; Julia has started doing Girl Scouts in earnest once again; Joe has been practicing his clarinet like crazy in the hope of being promoted to advanced band; both of the older kids and Julie came down with head lice; and I’m trying a new brand of shampoo, because the kind I’ve been using for the last thirty–odd years has been found to cause cancer.

It was Julia’s sixth and final walkathon, and rather than go all-out in an effort to finally hit the 25-mile award level, she decided to take it a little bit easy and enjoy her last time around the track with her friends. Of course, many of her friends were going all-out, but Julia cruised to the 15-mile level and called it a day.

Joe made it all the way to 20 miles (including the 5-mile bonus for playing soccer during the day), albeit with a little extra urging from yours truly. He was ready to stop after about 17 miles—his feet hurt, which was unsurprising considering his gym shoes were falling apart—but he changed back into his soccer cleats and kept going, at least as long as William and I kept him company. He got a snazzy stainless steel water bottle for his trouble; I feel like should have earned some kind of prize for carrying William around for at least half of that distance, but alas, my only reward was a very deep sleep Saturday night.

We’re unsure where the kids picked up lice, but we suspect it may have arrived in our little home on the head of William’s babysitter’s son. Regardless of how the little bugs got here, it was probably our turn: lice have been running rampant through the classrooms at Booksin for at least the last five years. Things have been bad enough that the kids have been urged to bring their own headphones to use in the computer labs. Somehow William and I have avoided the scourge thus far, though dealing with the treatment process (hours and hours of repetitive combing) has been no walk in the park. Julia was especially disappointed, because her infestation resulted in her missing her first-ever day of school.

With head lice hopefully behind us, Julia has joined a new Girl Scout troop and is diving headfirst into earning badges. This weekend, she worked on her basic cooking badge, which involved creating two delicious meals: for brunch this morning, she made chocolate chip pancakes with bacon and apple slices; and for dinner, she made a Nebraskan staple, runzas. Sometime in the next couple weeks, I’m on the hook to help her with the digital photography badge: we are supposed to spend a few hours reading and watching videos about photography online. Given my paucity of knowledge and skill, I’ll probably learn nearly as much as she does.

As alluded to by the title of this update, the kids’ school pictures came in this week, and we’ve updated their albums. Julia’s turned out very nicely, as did Joe’s, with the caveat that he had a pretty nasty case of dry, irritated skin around his nose and mouth on picture day: he had a cold that week, and had spent the previous several days fighting a running nose and licking his lips. In a very rare move for me, I’ve actually retouched his picture a bit, because the original was physically painful to look at.

We’ve also updated William’s vital statistics from his one-year checkup last month. He’s tracking around the 75th percentile for height and the 55th percentile for weight, so he’s a healthy, growing boy. We’re still waiting on a definitive first word, though.

In uploading this year’s portraits, I noticed that we never added last year’s class photos. I’m not sure what happened there, and will do some digging to see if they turn up.

William and the New Year

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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.

Gallery: William and the New Year

Thanksgiving 2009

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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.

Gallery: Thanksgiving 2009

William at Home

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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.

Gallery: William at Home