Just as school is back to a more normal routine this year, school pictures are more or less back on a normal schedule. This means we have them now, rather than at the end of the year, and that we have proper, posed portraits for all three kids instead of the snapshots we cobbled together at home last spring that left me thinking about dropping a not insignificant amount of money on light boxes.

William and Joe’s pictures are more or less your bog-standard school photos, and they did a pretty decent job of capturing each kid’s personality.

William’s picture doesn’t convey the unbridled glee you can see in some of his earlier portraits, but you can still pick up on his carefree and slightly silly bearing. Joe seems a little more self-conscious and guarded in his picture, but that’s who he is in real life, too.

Because Julia’s a senior, we took her in for a longer photo shoot way back in July; we’ve only now gotten around to picking the shots that we liked best from the proofs the photographer sent us a few months ago.

The longer session allowed the photographer to work with Julia to create shots that are a joyful and fun celebration of her senior year. But they also brought a startling (to me) realization: these are the last school pictures she will ever take. It seems like only yesterday that we posted her kindergarten picture. I expect this is just one of many “lasts” we’ll face over the next few months, along with a few firsts.

For example: she submitted her very first college application yesterday afternoon, after a great deal of consternation and worry. With one under her belt, our hope is that she’ll find the remaining applications comparatively less intimidating and easier to face.

The photos embedded in this post are small, low-resolution copies of the kids’ portraits. You can find the full-size pictures in the dedicated galleries.

Galleries: Julia, Joseph, William

After a summer that felt all too brief, August saw all three kids return to school in person at the same time for the first time in seventeen months. Julia and Joe started surprisingly early, on August 9 this year, with Julia attending a sunrise breakfast for seniors while Joe got an extra couple hours to sleep in. After the breakfast, Julia returned home with her friend Blain to collect her brother, and the three of them were off to start the year.

William started more than a week later, on August 18. He felt a little trepidation at first—he hasn’t had that many first days of school, after all—but he’s much more at ease now that he’s back into the swing of things. It helps that a number of his friends from previous years are in his class, and as an added bonus, the little boy who moved in across the street is as well. Compared to Julia and Joe at the same age, he has a veritable bonanza of kids in the neighborhood to play with.

All three kids have had busy starts to the year. Joe is focused on staying organized, as he’s taking two AP classes, including AP World History, which is infamous for generating a large amount of work. Julia is also taking a number of AP classes, though she’s debating whether she wants to stick with one of them, and she’s won a part in the fall play. She’s faced with balancing those requirements with preparing for the SAT and applying to colleges.

William’s schedule is comparatively simple, though he’s started on a new soccer team and continues to take virtual piano lessons.

There are a few more pictures in the photo gallery, including a couple from the inside of William’s classroom, which we’ve never seen in person due to COVID-19 restrictions. The schools are working hard to keep the kids safe, especially at Booksin, where the student population is largely unvaccinated. Back-to-school night was virtual for all all three kids, with all the technical challenges that entails: I think we missed four out of fourteen of the older kids’ class sessions due to problems with Zoom. But the overall sense I have is that the teachers and administrators are committed to making the school year as engaging and enriching as possible under the circumstances.

Gallery: Back to School 2021

Among the least important effects of the pandemic of the school year was the dislodging of school picture day from its traditional slot on the fall calendar. William’s school, Booksin Elementary, actually gave up on it entirely: they sent a message out to parents asking them to take pictures of their kids for the yearbook, perhaps fearing that they wouldn’t be able to get them on campus for professional portraits. Julia and Joe’s school, University Preparatory Academy, has, for better or for worse, more freedom to make (and change) decisions on the fly, and they decided to simply delay picture day indefinitely in the hope that they could pull something together in the spring, and their bet paid off. Hence, Julia and Joe have professionally lit and composted portraits this year, and William… does not.

In truth, I was happy and excited about the opportunity to take William’s picture. I’m always grateful for an excuse to pull out my camera and try something a little different, even if the camera itself is hardly top of the line: there are high school graduates younger than my camera. Of course, you can tell at a glance that William’s portrait was taken by an amateur: there are shadows on his face that no professional photographer would accept; the backdrop is overly distracting; and it took an ungodly number of shots to for me to be confident that the focus was correct. That said, I thought it turned out reasonably well for a first effort, and was making mental plans to improve and streamline the process for Julia and Joe’s pictures.

Alas, it was not meant to be. When UPA announced their plans to reopen this spring, they also announced their plans for school pictures, which included separate days for kids in each of the cohorts that were to split time on campus, as well as distinct days for kids, like Julia, in cohort C, who had opted to stay home full-time. In truth, I was a little disappointed, even if it did save me from buying a couple hundred dollars’ worth of lights, and the results were better than I could have produced even given an unlimited budget.

The versions embedded in this post are small, low-resolution copies of the kids’ portraits. To view and download the full size versions, you can check their dedicated galleries.

Galleries: Julia, Joseph, William

We managed to survive the summer of 2020 with our sanity largely intact, despite the fact that we were mostly cooped up in our home while the COVID-19 pandemic raged. I’ve been working from home since mid-March, and the kids spent the last two-and-half months of the school year doing distance learning with varying degrees of success.

The unusual circumstances made the end of the school year a bit anti-climactic: we were all home all day, anyway; only the schedules changed. Because of the circumstances, we were a little more relaxed about things like screen time than we would have been otherwise. In William’s case in particular, playing Minecraft with his buddies was the only meaningful social interaction he had.

This isn’t to say that the summer was entirely without stimulation. We put together a vegetable garden after having taken a year or two off (in the process of turning over the soil, I learned that William is deathly afraid of earthworms, which greatly limited his participation in that phase of the project), and we are still reaping the benefits of our labors in the form of a seemingly unending supply of tomatoes.

In July, Julie and Joe took on the task of repainting our patio furniture. This project got off to an inauspicious start when they went through several cans of paint without coming close to finishing the first chair. Even after a return trip to the hardware store for more paint, the problem persisted: each can stopped working after a minute or so, which didn’t bode well for the cost effectiveness of sprucing up the chairs.

Fortunately, after a phone call or two, the very nice folks at the spray paint company speculated that the hardware stores in the area might have gotten a bad batch of paint, and offered to send replacements. When the new paint arrived a week or so later, everyone was much relieved to find that it actually worked, and we now have patio chairs that are a beautiful shade of sage green. The refreshed chairs—Julie also bought new cushions—helped to make the patio a really pleasant place to spend time, which came in handy when I was forced outside to work because the boys were playing with their friends online in our bedroom.

For the first time ever, we even managed to grow actual sunflowers!

After a bit of cajoling, I convinced Joe to try his hand at a little bit of programming. I’m not sure it’s his favorite thing to do—there are, after all, limitless videos on YouTube to tempt him—but it was fun to work through some problems with him and see things through the eyes of someone who hasn’t been coding for the last 30 years. He got the hang of things pretty quickly, and though there are still a few chapters left in the book we’re using, I’m hopeful that he’s seen enough to know that it’s something he could do if he wanted to. We’re planning to spend more time working our way through the book during the school year.

Of course, all things come to an end, including—no, especially—summer vacation. School started for everyone in the second week of August the same way they ended in June: at home. We’re very fortunate to high-speed Internet and access to the equipment the kids need to participate and do their work. The older kids have hand-me-down laptops and spend their days holed up in their rooms. William has an older, but still functional, iPad in a ruggedized case to help it survive the rigors of being handled by a first grader on a daily basis, and he hangs out at his craft table in the dining room, which is bright and sunny and close to busy spaces like the living room and kitchen so he never feels too isolated or alone.

The change in circumstances called for an update to our usual first day of school pictures. Instead of posing in front of the car with their backpacks and lunchboxes packed and ready for departure, we snapped some photos of them holding their devices, ready to face a day of video chats, online lectures, and electronic assignments.

The album also contains a few shots of one of our last summer projects. For weeks, William had been asking to to make a special snack that one of his substitute teachers brought to class last year: rainbow jello. Through no small effort, Julie was able to acquire the seven (!) jello varieties required and, with a little help from William, put them all together to make the delicious treat you can see in the pictures.

Update: Please note that the rainbow jello pictures were taken by Julia.

Update #2: Corrected the color of the patio chairs from forest green to sage green.

Gallery: Back to School 2020