It’s been a veritable bonanza of updates this weekend. Rounding things out (unless I get motivated tomorrow) are new school pictures for Julia and Joseph.

We have pictures to post (albeit old ones), but before we get to them, I wanted to relay a story that will probably be funny to all parties concerned in a few years, but which, for the moment, we generally avoid discussing around the house.

People who visit from the Midwest are generally a little surprised at the way schools are constructed out here in the Bay Area. Before we had kids, I always thought they looked more like minimum-security prisons than proper schools: small clusters of low-lying, beige buildings surrounded by asphalt playgrounds and chain link fences. There’s generally no interior structure at all: classroom doors open to the outdoors, rather than hallways, and students go outdoors when they move between classrooms or go to the office, library or bathroom.

This last point threw my mother for a loop. “What do they do during winter?” she wondered. “What if it’s raining and the kids need to use the toilet?”

All of which brings us to our story. Now that Julia is in first grade, she’s no longer escorted to the YMCA daycare facility as part of a large group: the first graders are dismissed from class and make their way over there more or less on their own. A few weeks ago, she decided to take a quick detour through the girls’ bathroom, which is between her class and Y Care. There were a couple of other kids using the facilities, and Julia found a stall in which to do her business.

There are a couple of things that are important to understand about Julia before we go on. First, to put it delicately, she is a bit leisurely when she uses the bathroom. She just likes to do things at her own pace. Second, despite the fact that she is loud, outspoken and generally a ham when she’s in a comfortable situation, she can also be introverted and shy when she’s not. She’s gotten quite a bit better in this respect over the last couple years, but she still hesitates to speak up from time to time.

While Julia was taking her time, doing her thing, the girls in the other stalls finished up and left. Then, some time later, a janitor came in. I’m not sure exactly what he was doing or how long he was there—it was the end of the school day, so it seems probable he was tidying up and didn’t stay long—but he finished his work and made a point of asking if anyone else was there. Julia, being Julia, didn’t answer, so the janitor left, turned off the lights and—remember that everything at Julia’s school opens to outside—locked the door behind him.

It’s unclear exactly what happened next. It’s my understanding that pounding on the door and screaming were involved. Julia couldn’t have been stuck in there too long, because the Y Care people weren’t alarmed about the fact that she was late. Eventually, another maintenance worker—a girl maintenance worker, Julia is careful to point out—heard Julia’s cries and let her out. She got a personal escort over to daycare and no permanent harm was done. Julia learned an important lesson (“When someone asks you if you’re there, say, ‘Yes.’”) and we got a fun story out of the experience.

I promised pictures, so here you go. These are from the summer of 2008 and show the kids’ swimming lessons, a visit from Grandma Flack and Joe’s first real haircut.

Julia spent the last couple weeks settling in at school. She’s very enthused about the idea of being a first grader, but sometimes has a little trouble with accepting the reality of what that entails. That is to say, she’s still having some of the same problems she had last year regarding focusing in class and getting her work done when she’s supposed to. She’s not having any issues with the actual difficulty of the classwork, which we’re taking as a good sign; and she loves her teacher, Mrs. Peters. Rather, at times she’s just a little unclear on her responsibilities and our expectations.

Julie and I are racking our brains trying to figure out how to motivate her without dampening her spirit and enthusiasm. She’s fundamentally a good girl (of course, what kind of parent would I be if I felt otherwise?), but we need to help her understand that people are going to judge her based on how she behaves—she’s not going to make it on charm and looks alone, real-life examples from contemporary American society notwithstanding. If nothing else, we don’t have to worry about parenting being boring.

As part of the plan to address these concerns, we’ve decided to take a big step and start giving the kids an allowance: 25¢ for each year of age, or $1.50 for Julia and $1.00 for Joe each week. The exact amount will be adjusted based on their behavior at home and at school and whether they help out with their chores around the house, which largely involve feeding Maggie and helping me pick up apples in the yard. I’m looking forward to them mowing the lawn, cleaning the gutters and bringing me drinks by this time next year.

The other big news is that Joe is all set to start Junior K for real this coming week. He’s been busing over to Amber for the last month or so, but they’ve still been doing fun summer camp activities. On Monday, he gets his first real dose of school, complete with desks, school supplies and homework. He has the same teacher Julia did for Junior K, Ms. Aamoth (though she was Ms. Powell at the time), and a bunch of his preschool friends are in his class, so it won’t be a complete change of surroundings, but it’ll be a shift nonetheless. Knowing Joe, however, he’ll probably take it with aplomb.

Things have been pretty much normal for the last couple months, which is to say: hectic. Julia finished up Kindergarten in June, and although she loved it, it’s safe to say that she’s not in line to win high honors for her demeanor and discipline this year. She remains, as always, Julia. She’s smart, funny, passionate and energetic. She’s also mischievous, sensitive, impulsive and a bit of a ham. Her first grade teacher isn’t going to know what hit him.

On the subject of school, as you can see in the picture above, Joe has started busing over to Primary Plus, where he’ll be attending Junior K in the fall. We had planned to start sending him over there in August, so that he’d be comfortable and acclimated by the start of the school year, but decided to move it up a month for social reasons.

Because the class in front of him at preschool was a little on the large side, Joe and some classmates were held up in a younger kids’ classroom a bit longer than usual. Although this wasn’t ideal, it was perfectly OK: Joe loved his teachers, Ms. Pat and Ms. Raven, and a lot of his friends were in the same boat. The only real downside was that two of his best buddies, Mason and Joshua, had already moved up.

When summer came, things opened up a bit. Kids in the Pre-K room moved up and out to summer camps and other big-kid destinations, and spaces freed up in Room D, the class ahead of Joe’s. This allowed the administrators to move a bunch of kids from Joe’s classroom, Room C, up to Room D, and a new batch of kids into Room C from the first preschool class, Room A.

So far, so good. However, in order to minimize disruption for both the teachers and the students, the administrators decided to keep the kids who are moving over to Junior K this fall in their current classrooms: that way, they won’t have to make two transitions in the space of a few months. Unfortunately, this left Joe and a few other kids in a bit of a strange place. Children who were six months younger than Joe were being promoted ahead of him, and new kids that were significantly younger than him—two-and-a-half years old, as compared to Joe at age four—were moving into his class. This didn’t seem like a great arrangement, so we decided to move Joe over to Primary Plus this month instead of waiting.

Having turned four, of course, Joe was due for an annual checkup last month. He’s still tracking more or less in the middle of the normal range in terms of height and weight, so we’ve got no concerns on those fronts. A couple of shots were on the agenda for this appointment, and Joe was a trooper, as usual. He insisted on sitting on Julie’s lap, but didn’t scream or make a scene: he handled the first shot without making a sound and merely exclaimed, “Ouch!” after the second. Then he asked for a lollipop.

We have lots of pictures and videos lined up: baseball, Joe’s big show, day trips and other summer fun. With luck, we’ll get around to posting them over the next few weeks.

This post is only about two months late, but it roughly corresponds which Julia’s five-year checkup, which was just a couple weeks ago. According the doctor, she’s now three feet, seven inches all—they measure in feet and inches now, instead of just inches, which is a little bittersweet—and weighs thirty-nine pounds.

Julia’s also about two months into her kindergarten career, and she’s loving it, though I think she enjoys the after-school care run by the YMCA as much, if not more so, than school itself. She likes her teacher, Mrs. Romero, tremendously, but it’s not entirely clear what Mrs. Romero thinks of Julia.

The class uses an interesting disciplinary system. There are green, yellow and red apples posted on a bulletin board, along with the kids’ names. Every day, each child starts out on the green apple. Kids who are well-behaved stay on the green apple; kids who need to be reminded to listen or follow the rules move down to the yellow apple, though they can move back up to green if they pay particular attention to being good. Kids who don’t heed warnings or commit gross violations of the rules end up on the red apple for the day. At the end of the week, Mrs. Romero sends home a green, red or yellow certificate summarizing each child’s performance during the week.

Things started out well enough for Julia, and she was on green for the first month or so. But then things took a decided turn for the worse: she brought home red certificates for two consecutive weeks and a yellow certificate last week, which would seem to imply that she’s spent a fair amount of time on the red apple. Worse, for a while there, she was actually telling us that she was on the green apple every evening, so either there’s been a terrible case of mistaken identity or our darling daughter as learned to be a bit flexible with respect to the truth. We’re not quite sure exactly what happened on each occasion, but we’re told that spitting was involved at least once.

On the plus side, yellow is a step up from red, so at least we’re on an upward trajectory.

Obligatory Joe note: he’s now more or less completely potty trained, and we finally put away (well, hid in the shower) his potty chair last weekend. Naturally, he rewarded us by having two accidents yesterday morning.

So much for the momentum we were trying to build with that last post. Suffice it to say that it’s been a long summer that’s gone by very quickly.

Julia starts kindergarten in a little less than two weeks. There, I said it. But I don’t have to like it. Since the end of Junior K, she’s been having a grand old time at summer camp at the Y. So much so that I’m a little worried that she’s going to be upset when school starts again; she shouldn’t start feeling that way until at least third grade, right?

She’s going to be attending Booksin Elementary in the San Jose Unified School District, which is a little bit scary: apparently, we picked the worst possible year to have a child entering the public school system, as the state of California’s budget is an all-out train wreck and, thanks to the wonders of California politics, the state’s financial woes directly impact local school systems (where by “impact” I mean “bend, fold and mutilate”). The net result is that kindergarten class sizes have increased to around 30 across the district.

We gave some thought to keeping Julia at Primary Plus for another year or moving her to another private school, but Booksin had been very well regarded—at least before the news of the budget cuts hit. We’ll just have to see how things shake out.

Meanwhile, Joe continues his merry amble through preschool. We think he’s starting to get anxious in the particular classroom he’s in, because most of his friends have already moved up to the next room. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be have determined that Joe’s potty training isn’t quite up to snuff yet, and on some days, it’s pretty hard to argue with them. That said, he’s started to approach us about using the potty just before (or sometimes just after) he needs to, so it appears that we’re finally making progress on that front. Theoretically, he should be moving up to Room C at the end of the month.