Category Archives: William

Julia’s Birthday & Back to Booksin

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It’s been a busy fall since we returned from our trip to Texas. The kids started school in mid–August—which seems awfully early to me—and Julia had her tenth birthday at the end of the month. As she has pointed out on many an occasion since then, she is no longer a “little girl”: she is in double digits. To celebrate, we have pictures.

Both of the older kids are gradually acclimating to their new classes. Julia seems to have clicked with her teacher, Mrs. Kammann, and has been doing a reasonably good job of getting her work done in class and at home: so far, there have been many fewer battles over homework this year than last year. Of course, some of that may be down to the fact that there seems to be less homework than there was last year, but a positive step is a positive step.

Joe got off to a bit of a rocky start the first couple weeks of school with his teacher, Mr. Alderette, and threw several of what we unaffectionately call baby fits; the name comes from one of his preschool teachers, which should give you a pretty good idea of what kind of behavior we’re talking about. One such incident was bad enough that the school actually called me at work to let me know what had happened: Joe got frustrated that he hadn’t finished a particular project when Mr. Alderette told the class that time was up, and Joe flatly refused to comply. Eventually, the office was called, and the assistant principal had to take Joe out of the classroom to give him a chance to calm down.

That was about a month ago, though, and Joe seems to have adjusted his behavior in the weeks since. We’ve been checking in with jim on a daily basis to see how he’s been doing, and it seems as though things are slowly getting better. He has always had a bit of a hard time dealing with situations in which things go poorly, whether it’s getting problems wrong in class or striking out in baseball, and we’re focused on helping him learn how to deal with those kinds of truly inconsequential failures.

In the meantime, Joe has been working extremely hard to come up to speed on the clarinet. We’re just a few weeks into his first year of band, and he has already progressed to the point that Julie has been encouraging him to try out for the advanced band as soon as tryouts begin. He derives a tremendous amount of pleasure from learning how to play the notes he needs to get through each of the songs, and he keeps pushing ahead every time he practices. He has made a tremendous amount of progress in a very short time, and it’s been delightful to see him working so doggedly to achieve his goals.

Finally, at some point in the last week—it’s hard to say exactly when, because the older kids have been at home for fall break, and things have been chaotic around the house—William took his first, halting steps on his own. He first did it for me yesterday, at Joe’s soccer game, and I managed to capture a few seconds on video, which I’ll edit and upload later. He still has a ways to go before we can really say that he’s walking, but this is an exciting development nonetheless. He remains pretty quick on all fours, so that somewhat reduces his incentive to get up and walk, but I’m sure he will be very happy to be able to chase his big brother and sister around more effectively.

Gallery: Julia’s Birthday & Back to Booksin.

Texas 2014

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We’ve fallen off the wagon a bit in terms of posting pictures—a busy work schedule combined with the usual plethora of kids’ activities has gotten in the way—but we have a decent-sized batch queued up and nearly ready to go.

Over the last fifteen years or so, we seem to have accidentally fallen into a tradition in which we get together with some of our old college friends every five years: in 2004, we went to Paul and Joanna Williams’s house near Killeen, Texas, and in 2009 we all gathered at Dave and Rebecca Hyatt’s house in The Woodlands. Considering that no fewer than ten children have been born to the various families since the 2004 get-together, invading someone’s home no longer seemed like a viable option for the 2014 shindig. Instead, we decided to rent a house on a beach somewhere, so that no family’s permanent residence was at risk of being utterly destroyed. Naturally, we have pictures.

The place we decided on was called Luck o’ the Irish—charmingly, all of these beach houses seem to have cute names—in Surfside Beach, Texas. We stayed there a full week and had a fantastic time. The house was big enough to accommodate all twenty-one of us comfortably, and there were plenty of spaces for the kids to do their own things while the adults played board games and caught up.

The beach itself was wonderful—really far nicer than we had any reason to expect a beach on the Gulf of Mexico to be given our past experiences. Apparently there was a bumper crop of seaweed in Galveston this year that left some area beaches a foul, smelly mess, but by the time of our visit, the seaweed in Surfside had pretty much dried up, leaving a broad, coarse band between the house and the ocean that was little more than a mild nuisance.

We did see a couple jellyfish drifting around one day, and there was a fierce current that would carry you halfway to Houston if you weren’t diligent, but the water was warm and the surf was vigorous enough to be fun for the kids without being overtly threatening. The kids spent hours and hours swimming in the water and playing in the sand and by extension, the parents did as well: after the first couple days, I had the worst sunburn I can remember having, and I don’t burn easily. I spent the rest of the trip bundled in a swim shirt whenever I went out to the water, with sunscreen slathered on even under the shirt.

When we weren’t down at the beach, the kids were completely content to play on iPads and show off games they’d discovered to one another—if I weren’t already bullish on tablets as a platform before this trip, I certainly would be now. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much in the way of inter-child or cross-family drama. The biggest obstacle we faced was trying to stop William from climbing up the stairs to the upper level of the house. Well, that and the fact that the tap water was more or less non-potable, so we kept making quick trips into town to buy bottled water. It wasn’t until the second-to-last day that we noticed the page in the back of the house’s informational binder that warned that Surfside’s water exceeded the federal government’s maximum safe levels of arsenic. According to the warning, it’s perfectly safe for short exposures, but if we’re all dead in six months, you know what happened.

Before we went to Surfside, we stopped off at my parents’ new-ish house in Georgetown, near Austin, which Julia and Joe were very excited to see for the first time. Having spent much of the summer obsessively watching HGTV, they couldn’t stop talking about the various features of the house, though they did come to the conclusion that it was a little on the small side for us (an easy answer to arrive at, considering that it only has two bedrooms). Nevertheless, they had a great time camping out in Grandma and Grandpa’s spare room and counting golf carts on the roads within the gated community of Sun City.

We were flying out of Austin on our way home, but we had a few hours to kill between the time we had to be out of the house in Surfside and our departure. We decided to take a brief detour into Houston to visit Rice and see some of our old haunts. Thanks to a bit of lucky timing, I even managed to snap a quick picture of Joe outside the room that Joe Shidle and I shared during our senior year, twenty years ago.

They’ve done quite a bit of work on campus over the last couple decades, and naturally, as people who have a strong emotional affinity for the way things were at the time we were there, not all of it is to our liking. Most of that can likely be chalked up to ordinary, everyday antipathy toward change, but I’m genuinely saddened by some elements of the reconfiguration of Baker College, where we and most of our close friends lived. In particular, the formerly gorgeous and understated facade of the building, including the main entrance to the commons, is effectively gone, blocked from view from the inner loop by a massive new residential wing. I’m sure it seems completely natural to students who only know the Baker of today—and it’s definitely a plus if the new wing makes it unnecessary (or at least less necessary) to kick some students off campus for a year the way Joe and I were—but it’s not the way Baker looks in my dreams.

We made it back home just in time to start getting ready for school and all that entails. The kids still talk about the beach house, though, and as I was going through the photos to accompany this post, Julia mentioned that seeing them makes her feel a little bit sad, because she misses the house and her friends. By that measure, at least, the trip seems to have been a success.

Gallery: Texas 2014

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

Christmas Pictures

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As I hinted in our last update, having a working camera at Christmas allowed us more latitude in terms of taking pictures than we were accustomed to. The end result was hundreds of pictures—most of them not especially good: having a camera is hardly the same thing as knowing how to use one, and our new camera is a fair bit more complicated than the one we had before—to sort through, evaluate, and try to make presentable. Finally, nearly a month later, we’ve uploaded our Christmas album.

The season kicked off with the winter band concert at Booksin. After a year or so of learning the trumpet, things are starting to click for Julia. It helps that we belatedly realized that she has a secret weapon in the form of her mother: not many of her bandmates are lucky enough to have someone who played the same instrument for years and years at home. Rather than having Julia head off to her room to practice on her own, which was never very effective, we’ve taken to having her work one-on-one with Julie for fifteen minutes in the evening, so she’s getting expert, real-time feedback on how she’s doing. She’s showing real improvement, and she seems to be enjoying playing more as a result. She did a great job at the concert, even if she’s a little tough to make out in the photos, hidden behind her friend Zoe’s music stand and a giant saxophonist. The shots in which she’s front and center were taken after the show, when the band director let each group of kids come to the front of the stage for a photo opportunity—he certainly knows his audience.

For the second consecutive year, Joe’s YMCA Adventure Guides circle did an evening trip to Downtown Ice. Joe won’t be competing in short track any time soon, but he had a good time. Unlike last year, we actually met up with the group: I worked from home that afternoon rather than try to fight traffic down from Palo Alto during rush hour. My biggest takeaway by far was that ice skating is really, really painful; my feet are cramping up just thinking about it.

We spent the holidays at Grandma Flack’s house in Nebraska, and we were lucky to be able to see all of Julie’s brothers on Christmas day in Norfolk and later, at David’s place in Malcolm. Julia and Joe eagerly anticipated seeing their cousins, and they didn’t disappoint; Greg was especially patient with them.

One of the other things the kids were looking forward to—perhaps more than anything else—was Grandma Flack’s electric typewriter. They spent some time banging out notes on it the last time we spent Christmas in Nebraska (two years ago for those of you keeping track at home), and it was still fresh in their minds this time around. This year, in addition to assembling personalized missives for each of the adults in the house, they wrote notes for Santa, which we left out on Christmas Eve along with the traditional milk and cookies. Naturally, Santa took a few moments out from his busy night to leave them handwritten replies.

In contrast to the typewriter, one of the kids’ other thrills this year was watching the Doctor Who Christmas special, streamed over the Internet to my iPad, since Grandma Flack’s cable company doesn’t offer BBC America. Interestingly, they didn’t make much of a distinction between these two technologies, separated as they are by a more than a half-century of progress. To them, they were just ordinary things that worked and could more or less be taken for granted; if anything, the fact that the typewriter produced tangible, solid artifices they could hold in their hands made it more interesting than the purely virtual reality of the iPad.1

Of course, It was William’s very first Christmas, though he seemed a bit nonplussed by all the festivities. He spent a significant portion of our stay napping with Aunt Julie, who worked assiduously to find positions for him that might relieve gas pains. Grandma Flack was able to turn up a crib, swing, bouncy seat, and a playmat that was nearly identical to the one we have here in San José, so William felt right at home, as evidenced by the fact, he felt comfortable enough to maintain his policy of not sleeping for more than two hours straight.

He even did reasonably well on the flights to and from Nebraska. We didn’t have a seat for him, so he spent the entirety of his time on the plane on our laps, but he didn’t fuss much at all in the grand scheme of things. We flew Southwest, which doesn’t have assigned seats, so he actually served as an effective good-luck charm on the way out to Nebraska: I held him on my lap throughout the boarding process, and no one elected to sit next to me.

Flying Southwest had one other benefit: unlike most other airlines, they still don’t charge for your first checked bag, and we were able to take advantage of that policy to help us get the kids’ gifts (of which there were many: every year, we vow not to let things get too out of hand, and every year, we fail) back to California without having to spend too much on shipping. This year, we got away with just sending one large box via FedEx; everything else came on the plane with us.

While we were in Nebraska, Julia also started work on her very first science fair project. She did an experiment judging the effectiveness of different types of detergent in removing oil from feathers, chamois, and rabbit fur (being in the Midwest, rather than California, ensured that we wouldn’t have any problem acquiring whatever animal products we needed to conduct the experiments). Julia didn’t have to present her work or be judged this time around, but she enjoyed putting together her poster—which was covered in stickers, naturally—and testing her hypothesis. Going down to Champaign for the state science fair in the seventh grade is one of my favorite childhood memories, so I’m looking forward to even more exciting projects down the road.

Seating aside, the actual travel portion of the trip was more eventful than usual this year. I had forgotten how much fun it is to get through airport security with a stroller and an infant. Luckily, Julia and Joseph are both old enough to get through the process more or less independently, but I pity the poor, unfortunate souls who ended up behind us in the security line, especially now that the slower, hold-your-hands-in-the-air naked-picture machines have largely replaced metal detectors in the airports we travel through.

Making things even more exciting was the fact that Mother Nature was being extremely uncooperative while we were trying to get from place to place. While we were actually in Nebraska, the weather was fairly pleasant: a couple of times, it even got up into the 50s and 60s, warm enough for the kids to go outside and play with some of their new toys. But the visit was bookended by some absolutely brutal weather. Our outbound flight was delayed by almost three hours due to precipitation elsewhere in the country, long enough that we had to call ahead to make special arrangements with the rental car company so that we would have a way to get to Norfolk upon our arrival.

On the day we headed back to California, the temperature dropped to around zero, and the wind chill was unspeakably low. Our flight to Denver was delayed by more than four hours, and we missed our connection to San José completely. Fortunately, Julie was able to make last-minute hotel arrangements while we waited, and we spent the night in a cozy little room close to the airport. The kids (other than William, who didn’t seem to have an opinion) thought it was a grand adventure, while I was mostly worried about missing a day of work.

Gallery: Christmas 2013

  1. As an aside, that progress could grind to a screeching halt if the big telecommunications companies get their way on net neutrality. I’m probably biased, seeing as I make my living in the tech industry, but the open Internet has done more to drive innovation over the last twenty years than just about any technology, and companies like AT&T and Verizon are trying to kill it out of avarice. We probably shouldn’t let them. ↩

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

Meet William Wong

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The call came in around 3:15 on Thursday, October 19, after I’d settled back into work after a game of basketball over lunch. Actually, it wasn’t a proper call, since the microphone on my phone had died a few weeks earlier, making having actual telephone conversations a bit of a challenge. So instead I got a series of text messages culminating in a definitive directive: it was time to go home, because the baby was coming. Here’s a look at what the exchange looked like:

Messages

I was a little surprised to be summoned because on that particular day because it was our actual due date, and both Julia and Joseph had been substantially late—Julia by nine days. But Julie was having regular contractions with increasing frequency, so home I went.

Naturally, then, things seemed to subside while I was en route from Palo Alto. Whereas I was pretty convinced that we were going to have a new baby imminently when I left the office, I was now mentally gearing up for a protracted period of false labor and fruitless late-night visits to the hospital, much as we’d experienced before Joe was born. Since I was home anyway, I took Joe to soccer practice and did my best to calm my nerves in the park while he scrimmaged and Julia socialized with friends.

After soccer, we headed home for dinner—it’s always a treat to eat with everyone else during the week, because my work schedule rarely affords me the opportunity to do so—and as we ate, Julie’s contractions started picking up again. She called the hospital to check in, and based on the information she was able to provide, they recommended we head in. We grabbed our bags, which we’d finally finished packing just a few days earlier, left the dishes and the kids’ bedtime rituals to Julie’s mom, and headed up to El Camino Hospital in Mountain View.

We arrived in the hospital in the early evening, around 7:30 or so. We went through what seemed like a lengthy check-in process and settled into our room in the perpetual twilight of the Labor and Delivery ward. Another couple had arrived at about the same time we did, but overall, the department seemed quiet. Thanks to the monitoring software running on the computer next to Julie’s bed, we could tell that there were only three other patients at the time, and most of them seemed to be further along in the birthing process than we were. I was tickled by the fact that the software seemingly hadn’t been upgraded in the nine-plus years since Julia was born, and it still included the adorable—and completely incongruous—train icon that had no obvious function. Unlike the last two times Julie delivered there, I owned a phone with a camera this time around, so I was able to capture a screen shot of the train for you all to enjoy in the album.

Now that we were in the hospital, Julie’s contractions started to decrease in intensity and regularity once again. Of course. I figured that this meant we’d be sent back home to try again another day, but the doctor noticed that Julie’s blood pressure was running a bit high. High enough, in fact, to cause her concern about pre-eclampsia, so she decided then and there that she would induce labor with Pitocin and keep us there until the baby was born.

Things moved pretty slowly the rest of the night: there was enough downtime that I had an opportunity to hop online right at midnight and place an order for a new iPhone to replace my dilapidated model with the broken microphone. As usual for Julie, her contractions didn’t show up as regularly and dramatically on the monitor as those of the patients in the other rooms. Also, the baby was wiggling around quite a bit, so the external monitors wrapped around Julie’s belly couldn’t get a consistent read on his heart rate. Over the course of the night and into the morning, each of the nurses that came on duty tried to re-position the monitors, but none of them could get things lined up quite right; at one point, we had four staffers in the room trying to find his heartbeat. Eventually, they gave up and inserted an internal monitor so that we could get a consistent signal, where by “inserted” I mean that they screwed an electrical lead into his head.

Once the internal monitor was in place, it quickly became apparent that the baby’s heart rate was a bit inconsistent: it seemed to be dropping fairly dramatically during contractions. As a result, and also because one of the nurses observed what she thought was meconium in some of Julie’s fluids, staffers from the NICU were on call to step in after the baby was born.

Finally, bright and early the next day, Julie started to feel the urge to push. She hit the call button, but when the doctor arrived, the baby was high up in the birth canal, and Julie’s cervix was hardly effaced. Julie gave it another couple tries without success; the baby just didn’t seem ready to come out yet.

By late morning, Julie’s sense of urgency came back with a vengeance. Her nurse checked and announced she could feel the baby’s head, but once again, he had receded back up the birth canal by the time the doctor made it to our room. It seems that he was coming pretty far down with each push, but then popping almost all the way back up whenever Julie relaxed.

The nurse stayed with us for a while to tabs on how Julie was feeling. Finally, she made a decision: we were going to have the baby right then and there. Julie started pushing again, and we were seeing definite progress: William was inching closer to freedom with every contraction. The OB/GYN returned and noted that the baby appeared to be turning while Julie was pushing; she concluded that this twisting, corkscrewing motion was helping him to pop back up in between contractions. Nevertheless, she seemed confident that we were on track.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, but probably wasn’t more than a couple dozen or so pushes made in earnest, William was born. At Julie’s request, I wasn’t supposed to look, but I did anyway. My first thought as his head emerged was, “Is he not going to make it?” In the seven years since Joe was born, I’d forgotten what babies look like as they come into the world and how incredibly malleable they are.

Of course, he was fine. The NICU staffers were sent away, and William slowly acclimated to his new surroundings. His color seemed a bit off to me, but the doctor was unconcerned, though she noted that the heart rate issue we were so worried about had been caused by his umbilical cord, which he had cleverly wrapped around his neck. William got to spend some quality time with Julie before one of the nurses took him aside to administer a few vaccinations, take prints of his feet, and give him his first bath. Interestingly, one thing that had changed since the last time we were there was that all of this took place in the delivery room, whereas for Julia and Joe, the kids were whisked off the the nursery while Julie was moved to the maternity ward. The hospital is placing a much greater emphasis on keeping mother and child together nowadays, so William was rarely out of our sight while we were there.

One time they did take him away was when the time came to have him circumcised. After the experience we had with Joe, Julie was certain that this was the right thing to do, and I found it hard to disagree. Even our pediatrician, Dr. Kim, mentioned early on the pregnancy that he assumed we’d have it done when William was born, rather than opting out. The jury still seems to be out regarding the benefits and tradeoffs associated with the procedure—there are a lot of people with extremely strongly held opinions on both sides—and I realize that it’s largely irrational to base our decision for William on the exceptional circumstances Joe faced, but neither of us wanted to go through that again.

The remainder of the hospital stay was largely uneventful. I spent most of my time shuttling back and forth between the hospital and the house helping Grandma Flack get the kids to soccer and other activities. Julia and Joe visited for the first time Saturday morning after soccer, and their excitement and joy could be plainly read on their faces. The one hurdle we had to overcome was one Joe had encountered as well: jaundice.

We were due to check out of the hospital Sunday morning, but William’s bilirubin levels were still a bit high, so he ended up spending more or less the entire day under the bill light, only taking breaks to be fed and changed. The staff was anxious for him to have bowel movements to help clear his system, so they closely monitored his feedings, concerned that Julie’s milk supply might not have been high enough to push things along; at one point, they even asked us to supplement his feedings with formula. Given her experiences nursing the older kids, Julie was completely unconcerned on this front, but she went along with it anyway, figuring the last thing she wanted to do was to appear resistant to accepting medical advice. Once she started pumping and the nurses saw how well she was doing, it became a non-issue anyway.

As the day wore on, were waiting for a positive blood test that would clear us to go home. Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, a tech arrived to take a blood sample to be sent to the lab. For reasons we were never able to determine, she had a very hard time getting the blood from William’s heels, needing several apparently very painful attempts to get a sample. We were very happy to see her go (though William didn’t seem particularly thrilled to go back under the bill light), and then we waited. And waited. Dinner came and went, and we were still waiting. Finally, one of the head nurses came back with bad news: the blood sample had hemolyzed and was unusable; it’s unclear why it took so long to figure this out. A new tech took another sample—getting it right on the first try this time—and ran it down to the lab. And then it was back to waiting.

Finally, around 8:00 that evening, we got the news: William had been cleared to go home. We packed up our things, dressed him in the very same outfit that Joe had worn when he came home, and piled into the minivan for the drive back to San José.

Gallery: Meet William Wong