As usual, we have new school pictures for both Julia and Joe this year. Both kids have evidently forgotten how to smile like human beings.

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.

Seeing as I’m going to have a lot of time on my hands all of a sudden, it seems like an opportune time to get caught up on some pictures. So, off we go.

First, Julia’s spring school portrait came in, and you can find it in her class picture album. The spring portraits are taken in front of a green screen—the school didn’t actually haul the kids out to a woodland stream for the photo shoot—so we can provide alternate versions with different, equally unlikely, backgrounds if you like.

You might notice that there’s no corresponding spring portrait for Joe. As it turns out, when his teacher, Mrs. Glenn, asked the kids who were scheduled to have their pictures taken to line up, he misunderstood and, well, didn’t. He was very apologetic when he came home, thinking that Julie and I would be upset. Secretly, however, I was probably just as happy to get the check we’d written back un-cashed, especially in light of recent developments.

There’s also an entirely new album, covering various events of this spring and Joe’s seventh birthday. Quite a bit has happened over the last few months: Julia had braces put in and played the trumpet in the inaugural Booksin band—there are pictures of the end-of-year concert in the album. Of course, Julia privately admitted that sometimes she doesn’t bother pressing the buttons on her trumpet as she’s playing, but she’s performed Hot Cross Buns at home and sounded a lot better than I would.

We let Joe choose where we went out to eat to celebrate his birthday, and he chose to go back to Benihana, where we took Julia last year. Unfortunately for Joe, because his birthday was on a Monday night—and the night of the band concert—we actually went out the night before and saved cake and presents for after the show.

Both kids survived the 2012–2013 school year and are headed into summer camp starting next week; in spite of my recent change of employment status, we decided to leave them signed up for camp for the time being in order to minimize the amount of disruption they perceive. We’ll re-evaluate as the situation evolves.

Joe had a great year, though he did manage to force a second consecutive teacher into retirement. All told, three of the six teachers Julia and Joe have had at Booksin have retired immediately after having our kids in their classes. Mrs. Glenn was fantastic, however, and Joe thoroughly enjoyed first grade; he ended up being the class champion for the “Reading is Cool” program, which counts the number of pages the kids read at home during the school year. His handwriting, on the other hand, is pretty atrocious, much as mine was at his age. Julie has vowed that he’s going to spend a fair portion of the summer practicing.

Julia had a very Julia year. She continued to excel academically: she was one of only two students in Mr. Alderette’s class to finish the online math drills the school makes available, and she is reading well above her ostensible grade level. Her favorite after-school activity by far has been the GATE science program, a fact that brings a smile to this IMSA alumnus’s face.

On the other hand, Julia has continued to demonstrate her spirited nature in the classroom and at home. As well as she’s done in school, her greatest achievements have come in the realm of sheer cussedness. At one point, Mr. Alderette was actually sending home weekly progress reports on the level of disruption Julia was causing in class. Things seem to have come under control by the end of the year, but we’ll see when we review the kids’ report cards.

The aforementioned computerized math program, IXL, provides another amusing—if only in hindsight—example. Julie really, really wanted Julia to complete the third-grade sequence by the end of the year. Julia, for her part, was less driven to finish, but for the fact that Mr. Alderette would occasionally set up challenges in which the kids would receive Beanie Babies, which he called Brainy Babies, for finishing a certain number of lessons. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that we didn’t really start pushing for Julia to finish until the second half of the school year—and, if we’re being honest, the latter portion of the second half of the year—so the effort was tremendously backloaded, which the majority of the work being done in April and May.

As you can imagine, this resulted in a highly combustible environment, with all parties behaving at times in ways that made none of us proud. I honestly feel that actually getting Julia to sit still, concentrate and double-check her work was more effort than the math itself. Nevertheless, she finished—aided by the fact that Julie also set out the promise of Brainy Babies—just a couple days before the end of the year. We’re left with a house full of Beanie Babies and hopefully minimal psychological damage for all concerned.

Julia herself commented on the situation in the context of a class project in which she was asked to write a letter to Fern from Charlotte’s Web. In her letter, Julia asked Fern how she felt about her frequent visits to Wilbur the pig at her uncle’s nearby barn. She then went on to explain that were she in Fern’s shoes, she would not be able to visit as often as she might like, because her mother forces her to do at least 100 hours of IXL every night.

We have a ton of photos in the queue, and not just because we’re perpetually behind. In particular, we took a short trip down to the Monterey area last weekend, and managed to capture several dozen pictures just of the California coast.

In the meantime, while you have that to look forward to, I’ve uploaded Julia and Joseph’s most recent class pictures.