Quick Update: William’s Class Picture, Missing Photos, and School

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Digging through the piles and piles of stuff in our master bedroom / home office, we came across a few photos that we’d missed earlier in the year.

First, we found William’s class photo for kindergarten, which seems like a relic from another time. The photo was taken in February, and it was just about a month later that William walked out of Mrs. Herrera’s kindergarten class for the last time, not knowing that he would never return. Fortunately, he’s young and full of spunk, so he was fine. But it’s still strange to think about how things turned out.

Second, we discovered a pair of photos from our abbreviated visit to the San Diego Zoo that I’d forgotten to include when I first uploaded the set from our trip. They’re silly posed shots from the entrance to the zoo, but they’re fun and they also feel like they were taken a million years ago.

On the topic of school, plans for next year seem to be coalescing at last. San José Unified School District initially released a proposal last month that was plainly infeasible from the start: it called for the school year to begin with full, in-person instruction without any accomodations to enable social distancing, such as split classes. Their fallback plan was to divide students into two cohorts based on need: one group of children would always attend class in-person, and the other group would never attend class live. I’m not sure you could design a more problematic strategy if you tried.

Fortunately, the school district avoided having to implement their terrible plan thanks to a couple of entirely predictable obstacles. First, they apparently hadn’t run the proposal by the teachers, who understandably objected to being put on the front lines of reopening campuses without the strategies and tools necessary to do so safely. Second, it was clear even at the time the plan was announced that community transmission in our area was probably too high to behave as though nothing had changed. The final nail in the plan’s coffin came when the governor announced that counties on the state’s watch list—including Santa Clara county—would not be allowed to begin in-class instruction until they were taken off the list and remained so for fourteen consecutive days.

So, William will be starting first grade at home, with the possibility of returning to the classroom in October. We’re hoping the district will have a better, more coherent strategy with respect to distance learning than they did last spring, though the fact that they were floating silly ideas about reopening until just a couple weeks ago makes me a little nervous. We’re fortunate in that William is unlikely to miss out on much in terms of academic development and he doesn’t have any special needs that we can’t take care of at home (not to mention the fact we have the ability to stay home with him). But he does miss his friends and being able to run around with them on the playground.

Legoland and San Diego

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This post has been a long time coming: I had planned to put it together all the way back in February, shortly after our family trip to Legoland, but then things got very interesting very quickly.

Before we dig into what we’ve been doing for the last few months, we have a set of photos from the trip, which was a relatively spur-of-the-moment idea that sprang from Julie’s head. I had a day off for Presidents’ Day; Julie’s birthday fell on the same weekend; and the kids all had winter break / ski week the next week. As a result, Julie felt it was practically an imperative that we the take the kids somewhere. Additionally, I’ve long felt like we missed out on taking Julia and Joe to Legoland when they were in their prime Lego-building, Ninjago-watching years. That’s how the five of us ended up piled into the minivan for a road trip Friday evening.

We left after I got home from work (much later than Julie had hoped for, which is important for reasons that will become clear shortly). We planned to have Valentine’s Day dinner at Harris Ranch before the long drive down to Legoland in Carlsbad, which is about half an hour north of San Diego, but things got off to a bit of a rocky start when we realized that a great many other people had also decided to get out of town for the long weekend. It took us around two hours just to get down U.S. 101 to Gilroy, and the situation was complicated further by the fact that Joe was exceptionally well hydrated that day. We finally made it to the interstate, but were way behind schedule: we didn’t arrive at Harris Ranch in Coalinga until after 8:00.

Here, once again, it might have been prudent to listen to Julie’s judgement regarding our schedule: she thought it was late enough that we would be best served by grabbing something at a drive-through and getting on our way, but I thought we wouldn’t take too much of a hit by stopping to kick off the trip with a nice dinner and celebrate Valentine’s Day. Hindsight is always 20/20, of course, but it probably should have been clear already that we were in trouble. We didn’t get back on the road until around 9:30.

The rest of the drive was reasonably uneventful, other than the slowly rising tide of exhaustion that gradually silenced the car. One by one, the kids fell asleep, and eventually even Julie grew quiet, though I’m not sure she ever actually closed her eyes. We finally arrived at the Legoland hotel sometime around 2:30 in the morning, bleary-eyed and barely functioning. We dragged our luggage up to our room and passed out around 3:00, any hope of getting an early start at the park the next morning long gone.

The hotel itself was utterly charming, at least if you’re into Lego. The hallways and rooms were decked out with Lego-themed decor, and there was a daily scavenger hunt for clues that revealed the combination to a treasure chest in the room that was stocked each morning with small Lego kits for the kids. Julie and William especially liked the elevators, which were lit by flashing colored lights and played disco music whenever the cars were in motion.

Legoland itself lived up to expectations, as well. It’s no Disneyland, or even Great America, at least in terms of thrills for adults and older kids, but there were more than enough age-appropriate activities and rides for William. His favorite ride was Lego Ninjago the Ride, which takes you through a series of scenes from the Ninjago TV show, chucking virtual throwing stars at bad guys. There were other, more hands-on activities, as well: William spent a good forty-five minutes building boats out of Lego and sending them down a flume filled with obstacles. The biggest challenge there was making sure that no one else grabbed and disassembled your boat before it reached the bottom.

Even Joe found something to love: he rode the Aquazone Wave Racers—which had a short line because, seeing as it was February, it was pretty chilly in the evening—long after Julie and Julia had retired to the hotel room for the night.

The plan had been to spend one day at the park and then head to the San Diego Zoo Sunday morning, but since we had a late start on Saturday and our passes were good all weekend, we decided to ride a few more rides in the morning and depart a bit later. For once, things went more or less according to plan, and we got to the zoo in the early afternoon after stopping off for a quick lunch at McDonald’s.

Unfortunately, we’d miscalculated on one critical point: we didn’t check the zoo’s hours before planning our day. As it turns out, the San Diego Zoo closes at 5:00 in Februrary, which left us just a few hours to see what we could. We still saw quite a few exhibits, thanks to a very well-executed bus tour, but we really only scratched the surface of what the zoo has to offer.

That said, it might have been for the best, because William was starting to complain that he was tired and wanted to lie down; worse, his nose was starting to run. Unbeknownst to us, these were the first signs of a nasty bug that would eventually get the whole family, including Julia, who never gets sick. But, at the time, we thought that the exertions of the weekend, combined with repeatedly riding the water ride with Joe repeatedly the previous, chilly evening, might have been too much for him.

So, after a detour through the zoo gift shop—William came home with a stuffed narwhal based solely on his affection for the Ben Clanton book series—we made our way to our hotel for the evening. We were all pretty worn out, and nobody was in the mood to put too much work into dinner, so we used Yelp to see if we could find something nearby that would be quick and easy. This led to a truly lucky break: just down the block from the hotel was an unassuming taqueria, La Playa Taco Shop, that was just what we needed: the food was fantastic, and the atmosphere was such that a family of bedraggled tourists wasn’t going to ruin the experience for other patrons. If you’re ever in the Pacific Beach neighborhood in San Diego, Julie strongly recommends the Shrimp a la Diabla.

As tired as we were, the night wasn’t quite through with us yet. Over the course of the evening, I took a hike to the nearest drug store to get some cold medicine for William, who was growing more sniffly by the hour; we tried and largely failed to get Joe into the pool—he really wanted to swim, but was feeling a little self-conscious because he was 13 and there were some other young adults in the pool; and William somehow managed to lose his second tooth.1

Morning came quickly. We took the boys down to a restaurant on the beach for breakfast; having spent all of the previous two days with the family, Julia was more than ready for some alone time in the hotel room. After wandering around near the water line for a bit, we piled back into the car to begin the trip northward.

We started off by taking the scenic route along the coast from San Diego to La Jolla, where, had things gone differently with my then-employer in 1998, we might be living today. We spent some time driving around town, failing to locate some landmarks I had dredged up from twenty-year-old memories of my earlier visit. Eventually, we ended up at La Jolla Shores, a beautiful, mile-long stretch of beach, giving Joe and William the opportunity to stretch their legs and play in the surf for a couple hours before the long drive up the interstate (Julia, true to form, sat in a chair reading a book).

The rest of the trip was blissfully uneventful. We took a slight detour through Anaheim so we could have a quick dinner at Portillo’s, which still doesn’t have a location in Northern California. And we took a slightly longer side trip into Los Angeles in an effort to fulfill Julia’s desire to see the Hollywood sign, but we were too late: the lights were already off for the evening by the time we got there.

After that, it was more or less a straight shot home, where we arrived at the relatively sane hour of midnight.

There’s a lot more to be said about what we did—and, just as importantly, what we didn’t do over the intervening months—but I’ve gone on long enough and these pictures aren’t getting any fresher, so that will have to wait for another time.

Gallery: Legoland

  1. William lost his first tooth back on January 20. ↩︎

Cold Weather, Ch-Ch-Changes, and Fall 2013

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It’s finally starting to cool off in our part of California—a part which, fortunately for us, is not currently on fire; there are many who are not so lucky. It’s going to get down to 42° Fahrenheit tonight, a temperature that isn’t that cold by Chicago or Nebraska standards, but still feels pretty chilly when you’re shivering outside the school waiting for the bell to ring.

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that we don’t currently have a functioning furnace. Ours stopped working sometime last winter, and we decided against an expensive repair because we thought that we would surely be out of the house and ensconced in a rental by the time the next winter rolled around. That assumption has worked out really well for us.

For now, the first thing I do in the morning is step into a pair of cozy slippers and pull on a heavy sweatshirt before I head up to the kitchen to make the kids’ lunches. And, after they’ve gone and it’s time for me to get ready for work, I think long and hard before I turn off the water and step out of the warm confines of the shower onto the icy tiles of our bathroom floor.

Of course, the chill in the air means that Halloween is just around the corner. William carved a pumpkin (with Julie’s help) at school today, and had decided, the last time I asked him, that he wanted to dress up as Darth Vader this year. Fortunately, that’s one of the many costumes we already have in his vast collection, so as long as he doesn’t change his mind, we won’t have to buy a new one this year.

This Halloween, for the first time, neither Julia nor Joe seems to be interested in trick-or-treating. Instead, they’re planning to stay home to hand out candy or, just as likely, hide out in their rooms. Although this was an inevitable transition, it’s still bittersweet: they have so much going on in their lives, and so many stressors coming at them from so many different angles, I wish they could hang on to their sense of wonder and fun for one more Halloween and have a night of carefree jollity.

Speaking of fun, frivolity, and bittersweet transitions, we received an email from UPA this week letting us know that the registration deadline for students taking AP tests this year is coming up in a couple weeks. And, in a real first, Julia will be eligible to take the AP World History exam in the spring. I’m gobsmacked that our daughter is taking concrete steps toward (hopefully) receiving college credits, while the memory of her clinging to me every morning as I tried to drop her off for kindergarten is still painfully fresh in my mind.

In other fun news, Julia is set to have her wisdom teeth removed over the holiday break after we return home from Nebraska. This step is a prelude to a series of other procedures on tap for the next couple years that won’t be fun—for us or for her—in the moment, but will pay off down the road if all goes according to plan.

We don’t have any new pictures ready to post at the moment, though I do hope to publish a set this weekend covering Halloween and some other fall adventures. In the meantime, here’s a set of previously unpublished photos from fall 2013 that I’ve finally gotten around to processing. The album contains lots of soccer pictures, any number of cute shots of baby William, and a few snapshots from my very first visit to the Airtime offices in New York City.

Gallery: Fall 2013

School Pictures & Walkathon 2019

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Shortly after we posted Julia and Joe’s school pictures, we were notified that William’s was on its way. Had we received it a bit sooner, we could have consolidated all three into a single post, but then we wouldn’t have anything to talk about now, would we?

Without further ado, here’s William’s kindergarten portrait.

Will’s Kindergarten Portrait

His hair is a little long in this picture—and it’s even longer now—but his joyful demeanor comes through pretty clearly. You can find the full-size version, as well as all his past school pictures, in his album.

One event has come to play a central role in our Octobers over the last ten-odd years: the Booksin Walkathon. This year was William’s second official walkathon, and though he wasn’t as outwardly enthusiastic as some Booksin kids, he was motivated enough to want to be there right at the start of the event.

He began the morning walking with me, but the person he really wanted to walk with was Macey, the girl we have been informed that he is going to marry. He spent most of the day walking with Macey or playing with Macey on the side of the course, and when he wasn’t doing one of those two things, he was looking for Macey. It’s not 100% clear whether his ardor is completely reciprocated, but they did seem to have a good time.

Will and Macey pinky promise

In the picture above, Will had just finished his twelfth mile, and in doing so, had earned a candy reward. Macey was still one lap short, so she and Will were pinky promising to meet up at the awards desk to get their candy together.

This is where I came in and—to hear William tell it—messed things up. It seemed silly to me for Will to just wait for Macey at the candy table, especially since it was getting late in the afternoon and he still had a couple miles to go to reach the next prize level. With that in mind, I convinced him to try to catch up with Macey so they could finish her twelfth mile together and get their candy at the same time. Unfortunately, finding her on the course proved harder than I had imagined, and after we finished another lap, Will insisted we head over to the awards desk where, naturally, Macey had already obtained her candy and was wondering why Will had ditched her.

It mostly worked out in the end: Macey had Fun Dip and William enjoyed a Rice Krispies Treat. But William solemnly informed me that I was responsible for a grave faux pas: forcing him to break a pinky promise. Hopefully I’ll be able to live it down someday.

After the pinky promise misadventure, William was really starting to slow down: twelve miles is a pretty good distance for a six year old to cover in a single day. At around 3:30, with about half an hour left in the Walkathon, I thought he was four laps, or about 1.3 miles, short of the 14 miles he needed to earn a frozen treat. I asked him if he wanted to go for it and, to my surprise, he assented. We walked the next two laps at a decent pace, but were still a bit short on time. Will still wanted his ice cream, however, so we ran a good portion of the last couple laps, and made it with minutes to spare.

In the end, he was credited with 15 miles for the day, one more than I thought we’d covered. I’m not entirely sure whether I lost track or there was an error at the lap punching station—both seem equally likely given my mental state after having spent seven hours walking in circles in the sun—but he was derservedly proud of his achievement.

Julia and Joe didn’t miss out on the festivities, either. Even though they’ve been gone from Booksin for several years, UPA has annual community service requirements for its students, and opportunities to pick up big chunks of volunteer hours all at once are golden. Thus, they—and Julie—were at school at 5:45 in the morning to help set up, and they spent the day punching lap cards, handing out awards, working the concessions booth, and helping out at the Crazy Hair station. Julie and Julia even stayed for an extra hour or two after the Walkathon ended to help clean up.

As you can no doubt imagine, everyone slept well that night.

School Pictures 2019 (Big Kid Edition)

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It‘s been a busy fall here in San José, with enough happening that there have been scant opportunities for fun diversions like going through photos. At times, it seems that we are barely keeping our heads above water, but the house hasn’t been condemned yet, so I suppose things can’t be that bad.

The older kids both have busy schedules this semester. Joe powered through a full year’s worth of math over the summer so that he could skip ahead to Integrated Math 2 this year, which hopefully will challenge him a bit more than his math class last year. He’s also started Spanish, which presents its own set of challenges and definitely takes him out of his usual comfort zone. I think this is a good thing, as Joe doesn’t always respond with enthusiasm to things that don’t come to him without effort.

Julia is taking AP World history, which seems to be an unstoppable homework-generating machine. She’s also acting in a couple plays this fall (to be fair, she only has a single line in one of them), so her afternoons and evenings are as full as ever. She can be a little grumpy at times when she’s feeling stressed, but there’s no question that she works extremely hard.

Their school pictures came in last week. I’ve included small copies below, but you can find the full-size versions in their respective galleries.

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Wong Joseph IMG 2812 T2 ZFP 3295 79742 2 004

William’s School Pictures and Final Exams

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We’re approaching the end of the school year, and as summer draws near, we’re faced with the usual array of events, commitments, and stressors: open houses, band concerts, field days, and, looming largest of all for the older kids, final exams. The next week looks to be very busy for Julia and Joe, with one or two finals each day through Thursday, including Monday, which happens to be Joe’s birthday.

Julia, at least, is already in a finals frame of mind, having stayed up past 11:30 at least three times last week in an effort to wrap up projects and stay on top of things going into finals week. Miraculously, she made it through the week without killing us (and vice-versa) and proceeded to sleep until noon on Saturday. Our goal for the weekend is to pay back that sleep debt and go into finals on steadier ground.

Joe has it a little easier this year, if only because his schedule is a little less intense. That’s probably just as well, because he’s started taking online math classes with the goal of skipping ahead so that he’ll be a little more challenged next year. Currently, he’s in Math 7, which is on the normal track for seventh graders at UPA. The normal progression would be to take Math 8 next year, and then either Integrated Math (IM) 1 or 2 as a freshman, depending on how well he does—Julia is in IM 2.

Joe is working through the IM 1 curriculum via an online class offered by BYU. If he can finish it by the end of the summer, he’ll be able to start out eighth grade in IM 2. One challenge he’s facing, however, is that he got a bit of a late start due to circumstances outside his (and our) control. As a result, he’ll most likely have to start the second semester curriculum before he’s finished the first semester, and for some amount of time over the next couple months, he’ll be working on both at once. He and Julie are working very hard now to get a bit ahead of the game so that the overlap can be as limited as possible, but there’s a fair bit of ground to cover.

William, of course, has no such concerns. His biggest question over the last few weeks was whether he would be graduating to kindergarten immediately after his TK class finished working through the alphabet at a rate of one letter per week. As much as he loves his current class—and Ms. Pak has been fantastic—I think he was a little disappointed to learn that he’ll have to wait until August to move up.

Last Friday was field day for William’s class, in which the kids spend most of the day outside playing games and participating in other activities, such as cornhole, bean bag toss, and lawn darts (disappointingly, they didn’t look anything like the deadly instruments I remember from my youth). Julie, as one of the room parents responsible for organizing the activities, was a little concerned that they might not have enough volunteers to man each of the stations, so I stuck around after dropping William off in class to help set things up.

As the kids were arriving, it became clear that there were more than enough parents to keep things running, so Julie released me to head into work. It’s rare for me to see William during the school day, so before I left, I made my way over to the lawn dart station where he was waiting in line to give him a hug. Normally, he’s a very enthusiastic and affectionate (and enthusiastically affectionate) guy, so I was surprised when he pulled away from me, muttering something indistinct. I couldn’t make out what he had said—he can be a little tough to understand under the best of circumstances, let alone when he’s surrounded by a couple dozen other kids energetically throwing things around the schoolyard, so I approached him again to say goodbye and to tell him that I loved him. Once again, he shied away from me as I approached and did his best to act as though I wasn’t there, so I was left to make my way back to my car wondering what I’d done to offend my five year old.

It wasn’t until I arrived home in the evening—greeted, as has often been the case the last few weeks, by William running to meet me at the door shouting, “DADDY! DADDY! DADDY!”—that we figured out what had happened. It turns out that Ms. Pak had been very clear in letting the kids know before they headed out to the yard that the parents were there to work and to help all the students; as such, they would not have time to give their own kids the kind of attention and affection to which they might be accustomed. With that in mind, Ms. Pak warned, if a student ran off to his or her parent, distracting them or preventing them from giving their full attention to the other kids, the errant child would be asked to sit out the activities.

So, William was concerned, not altogether incorrectly, that I was potentially jeopardizing his participation in the fun and games. Luckily for me, all was forgiven by evening.

Although we don’t have a full set of photos to share at this time, we recently received William’s spring portrait, which you can admire below. He picked out his outfit on the day pictures were taken, and when the photos arrived in electronic form, he selected the backdrop from among the options provided by the photographer.

If you’d like a higher quality version of the portrait or a copy of his class picture, they’re both posted in William’s school picture gallery.

TK Spring Portrait

Gallery: William’s Class Pictures

Drama and School Pictures

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We had a bit of family drama this weekend, but probably not the kind you’re expecting. Rather, it was the culmination of many hours of effort on the part of Julia and a couple dozen other kids leading up to the school play, The Somewhat True Tale of Robin Hood. Julie went to the premiere Thursday night, and the whole family made it to the final show Saturday afternoon.

Julia played two minor speaking roles—a fawning lady and the guard—and the cast was filled with various friends and acquaintances; one of Joe’s old friends, Lucas, played Little John. Julia had a great time working on the play, despite the long hours of rehearsals, and though it will be nice to get her evenings back, I’m sure she would tell you it was worth it. The spring show is a musical; we’ll see if either kid decides to give that a shot.

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The older kids’ school pictures finally came in, as well. I’ve included small copies below, but you can find the full-sized versions in their respective galleries.

Ninth Grade

Seventh Grade

The Final Countdown (To William)

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It seems that 2013 was a busy year, at least judging by how long it’s taking us to get through all the pictures we took. We’re happy to present another new/old album of photos from that era, though this one bears a unique distinction: it’s the final set from before William arrived, harkening back to a simpler time, when Julie and I were
not outnumbered by other members of the family (as long as you don’t count the cats who, unlike the kids, haven’t yet shown much interest in tearing down the familial power structures).

This album documents roughly a month-long period from the middle of August through the middle of September, just a few days before William was born, and it includes Julia’s ninth birthday and a whole lot of soccer. I can only surmise that we were taking more pictures than usual at the time because we were trying to get the hang of the camera we’d bought to capture William’s arrival. This would explain why the album contains an average of four pictures for each day of the month it covers, as well as why the photos were taken using an incoherent mixture of camera settings and lenses (those with an eye for such things will be able to identify the pictures taken with the cheap zoom lens we bought on eBay).

Five-ish years later, things are quite a bit different. William is loving school and is slowly but surely getting the hang of reading, even if he can’t quite handle the differing pronunciations of ”th” and “f”. As a result, his “thirty” sounds a lot like his “forty”, which makes counting games interesting. He is particularly enamored of a classmate of his named Alexa, for whom he’s drawn a great many pictures over the last few weeks (see below). We haven’t yet had the nerve to break it to him that she won’t be attending Booksin next year—she’ll join her siblings at St. Chris.

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Julia has had rehearsals for the school play until 8:00 almost every night of the week; as a result, we’ve often been up until 10:30 or 11:00 finishing up homework and studying. For now, at least, I don’t really begrudge her teenage tendency to sleep in on the weekends: she needs it. Days like a week ago Thursday, when she had to wake up at 4:00 to get the airport for her journalism trip, certainly don’t help.

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Gallery: The Final Countdown (To William)

Extra Summer Fun, 2013 Edition

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While cleaning up the pictures from the last set we posted, I noticed that there were a very few photos from spring and summer 2013 that never made it into an actual album. Some of them seemed like keepers—including Julia’s brave attempt at pitching in a softball game and Joe’s initial, valiant struggles with riding his bike without training wheels—so it seemed a shame to let them languish unseen on our computer. Hence, a very small album: Extra Summer Fun. Most of the shots of Joe’s cycling adventures are in the form of video clips, so they’ll have to wait for another time.

The older kids have wrapped up their first marking period at school and have settled into a reasonable rhythm, a few hiccups notwithstanding. Julia has signed up for, among other things: a role in the fall play, The Somewhat True Tale of Robin Hood; the Girls Who Code club; and a spot on the school’s ComedySportz team, which is a thing I didn’t know existed. She’s also really enjoying her journalism class thus far, particularly the photographic side of the subject. She’s headed to the National High School Journalism Convention in Chicago at the beginning of next month, and she’s predictably very excited about the trip. Unfortunately, Grandma and Grandpa Wong will have migrated down to Texas by the time she gets there, but she’s still happy to be visiting a city with which she has a passing familiarity.

Joe has been less interested in extracurriculars so far, but he does seem to be free of much of the drama that he was wrapped up in last year; sometimes a change of scenery is just what the doctor ordered. Maybe next year we can talk him into being more of a joiner.

We are continuing to move forward at a glacial pace with our plans to remodel the house. It’s par for the course for the Bay Area, but the numbers being thrown around are staggering. Of course, it doesn’t help that, true to form, our timing is terrible. But nevertheless, we persist.

We’ve decided to go ahead and work through the formal planning permit process so that we can squeeze in a few extra square feet of living space beyond what would normally be allowed by the planning department. Hopefully we can get by with a simple administrative review, rather than a public hearing: I’m not particularly excited about the prospect of giving our neighbors, kind as they are, oversight over what we do with the house, especially given that we are only looking for a slight deviation from the normal requirements: about 80 square feet, all in the back of the house, invisible from the street.

We’ve re-engaged our architect and are in active discussions with a few different builders, so we should have more tangible progress soon.

Gallery: Extra Summer Fun

William is Five

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Much has happened in the month since we last posted, but by far the most significant happening was William’s long-awaited fifth birthday. We haven’t processed the pictures from the grand occasion yet—there are some in the works—but he is already asking when his next birthday will be, so it seems safe to conclude that he had a good time.

As you know if you’ve been following our birthday updates over the years, one of our longstanding traditions has been that the birthday boy or girl gets to have dinner (with the family, of course, though I think the older kids would prefer otherwise) at a restaurant of his or her choosing. In recent years, this ritual has proven to be be a bit costly, as both Julia and Joe have settled on Benihana as their favorite place to celebrate. William, thankfully, took it easy on our schedule and our budget by going a different direction entirely: Burger King. We went on Saturday night instead of his actual birthday to eliminate the time constraints of a school night, and we were joined there by Kai, one of William’s oldest friends, and his family.

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Although William received a great many things for his birthday—as often seems to be the case on these occasions, you don’t realize quite how many gifts you’ve acquired until you actually gather them in one place to wrap them—perhaps the most exciting to me was one we bought secondhand: a bicycle. It’s Avengers-themed, which seems only appropriate given William’s love of superheroes, and it was an immediate hit when we showed it to him on Sunday. With luck, we’ll be able to wean him off the training wheels in the next year or so.

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In other William news, we received his first school picture from Booksin, and although it’s perhaps not the best picture he’s ever taken, it does capture his personality reasonably well. It can be viewed in full size and in context with his preschool portraits on his school pictures page.

Transitional Kindergarten

Finally, though we don’t have a full set of pictures to present today, we do have something slightly different. It happens to be our eighteenth anniversary, and I’ve uploaded the video my Uncle Jack recorded at our wedding and reception. The fortuitous timing is actually a bit of a coincidence: I’ve been working on getting this footage into the computer and online for the last couple months, but the date provided a bit of extra motivation to knock it out this weekend.

The quality of the video isn’t great—it was originally VHS, after all—but I’m glad it worked at all, given the age of the media. The result is probably about as good as you can expect, absent a willingness to spend couple hundred dollars on a time base corrector on top of the money we already spent on a VCR (ours stopped working years ago) and a video capture device. Now that we have a digital copy, we no longer have to worry about the tapes crumbling into dust; and should the impulse ever strike us to relive our interminable first dance, we can do so effortlessly.