Early 2013

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We don’t have many new photos to present at the moment, though there are a great many pictures from the summer we have yet to process, so we’ve thrown together a small collection of photos from early 2013, way back before William was born, and not too long after we had learned that he was on his way.

In the meantime, the school year is well under way—we’re entering its third week, and William’s first full day is tomorrow—and the summer’s festivities are gradually coming to an end. The Parks for Life program Julie has been doing with the kids wraps up on Friday, and the older kids’ swimming lessons are finished on Thursday.

So far, Julia has adjusted beautifully to the more complicated world of high school. She’s enjoying her classes, has found a nice group of friends, and even has a part in the school play. She’s been great about working on Khan Academy with me to get ahead of the game in math, and she’s had a positive attitude about working with us to adjust to the greater challenges presented by high school coursework.

Joe, likewise, is staying on top of things. He hasn’t had much homework to speak of yet, but Mr. Guevara, his history teacher and one of the principals behind the founding of UPA, said at Back to School night that we should expect that to change shortly. The biggest challenge he’s facing at the moment is the fact that his clarinet isn’t working right, which has him stressed out and Julie making multiple trips to the music store to get things sorted.

Finally, William is loving TK with Ms. Pak. According to Julie, his only complaints have been that he doesn’t get to stay long enough, and that there’s not enough time to play outside during lunch recess. Both of those complaints will be addressed this week, when the class switches from half days to full days, giving him a longer lunch break and about two and a half extra hours at school each day.

He’s also started working with the new Khan Academy Kids app, which has him very excited because he gets to do “homework” like his older siblings. We’ll see how he feels in a few years when we’re making him do math exercises over the summer.

Even with limited time in class, he’s already producing masterpieces like this:

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One can only imagine what he’ll do with another ten hours every week.

Gallery: Early 2013

Back to School 2018

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It’s been a while since we posted any new pictures—largely because we’ve been busy with other projects—but the new school year has arrived, which means that it’s time for our annual back-to-school pictures.

Julia is starting high school this year, which is scary on any number of levels (though it will actually be more of a shock to me when she starts her sophomore year, for reasons that are specific to my situation). She’s found a nice group of friends and is going into the year with a great deal of enthusiasm that has yet to be damped by the workload, which one of her school administrators promised at the eighth grade promotion ceremony last spring would be heavier than what the kids would encounter in college. I have my doubts about that particular assertion, but nevertheless, the specter of testy late-night study sessions hangs over us.

Joe is moving to UPA for seventh grade this year, which makes this the first time since 2014 that he and Julia have started the year at the same school. He’s a little bit nervous about changing schools after having spent a single year at Willow Glen Middle, but we are hopeful that the change in context will give him a fresh start socially; as our old friend Michael Kimmitt has pointed out, middle school boys are generally awful (though he typically uses more colorful language in his description).

He’s especially nervous about his placement in Advanced Band, where he is the only seventh grader and one of only two middle school kids. He’ll be fine once he gets the music and starts playing—the intermediate band at Willow Glen does a great job of pushing kids’ abilities—but his trepidation reminds me of how an age difference of just a couple years can feel like a yawning chasm in seventh grade.

Lastly, William is starting TK, or transitional kindergarten, this year. It’s a relatively new program at Booksin that provides a bridge to kindergarten for four-year-olds who were born between September 2 and December 2, and thus just missed the cutoff. They start off slowly, with half days for the first couple weeks of the year, but after that, he’ll be at school all day, just like his brother and sister. As you can imagine, this is all very exciting for William—and also for us, even if it means we have to make three lunches every morning instead of two.

Julia's first day of high school

Joe's first day of seventh grade

William gets dressed for school

William's First day of TK

Christmas 2017

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It’s officially summer here in San José: the kids are out of school; Julie has taken the three of them to Nebraska (and back); and Julia is off to Camp Campbell this afternoon.

But the biggest news of the year so far is that we are somehow the parents of a high school student. This would have seemed inconceivable just a few years ago, but we’ve checked, and it appears to be true.

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Even scarier, if we’ve done the math right, Joe will be taking the same step in just a couple years’ time. Of course, William won’t be done with eighth grade for another ten years, so we still have a long road ahead of us; we’re not done with packing lunches by a long shot.

It‘s Father’s Day today, and we’ve celebrated thus far by eating donuts for breakfast, after which Julie took the boys out for some Parks for Life activities. After lunch, I’ll be taking Julia to camp—she’s at the stage of her life in which being seen in public with a single parent is excruciatingly embarrassing, and being seen with her entire family would be utterly intolerable—and assuming my car has enough charge to make it back down the mountain, we’ll go out for a hike (more Parks for Life) and then have pizza this evening.

Speaking of Parks for Life, on one of the activities earlier this summer, William made an unexpected (and unwelcome) friend:

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He doesn’t seem to have suffered any real adverse effects—there are no signs of a bull’s eye rash—and he was an complete champ about having it removed, but it was still something of a shock. For all the traipsing around in the woods we’ve done, going all the way back to my childhood, none of us had ever picked up a tick before. Never let it be said that we haven’t exposed to the kids to a variety of different experiences.

All that aside, we’ve posted a few more recent pictures this time around, from our trip to Nebraska for Christmas last year. We’ll be back to our regular schedule of six-year-old photos shortly, but I thought it might be nice to mix in a few of more recent vintage.

Gallery: Christmas 2017

Fall 2012

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It’s finally spring here in San José, after a winter that seemed to go on forever. Although we really needed some rain after a dry fall and end to 2017, it’s nice to have some sunshine and warmth. We’ve had a busy few months, with limited time for fun hobbies like sorting through and cleaning up photographs, but I’m very pleased to be able to post a collection of very nice snapshots from a simpler time: all the way back in the fall of 2012. In my defense, I think this is actually the final set of photos from 2012 to get online, so the next batch will be somewhat more recent (though there are still some gaping holes in the last five years).

Since our last post, Julia has completed her long-awaited trip to Washington, D.C. with her eighth-grade class. We dragged her to the airport at 4:00 in the morning on March 30 for an early flight so they could touch down in the afternoon and hit the ground running. She was more awake than I was, as you can see in the photo below; after seeing her off, I went home and slept for another hour or so before heading to work.

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Despite having a hard time falling asleep the first night—we received a late-night video call bemoaning her plight—she had a great time on the trip and returned energized and happy; she was particularly enamored with the story of the true origins of George Washington’s teeth. And, thankfully, she avoided my fate.

One downside of the timing of the D.C. trip was that Julia missed Easter; this distressed her greatly, and she exacted a promise from us that we would stage an Easter egg hunt for her benefit upon her return. On the actual Easter morning, Joe and William were up bright and early, as you might guess, and Joe played the part of big brother to a hilt, watching bemusedly as William raced from hiding place to hiding place shouting, “Egg!” for every treat he found.

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Things have slowed down a bit over the last few weeks, but are primed to pick up again next month. William will be wrapping up preschool in May, and shortly thereafter, the older kids will each be taking separate trips to Disneyland with their respective school bands. This flurry of activity will culminate—unless something takes an unexpected turn—in June with Julia’s eighth grade promotion, which, if I’ve done my math correctly, means that we’ll be parents of a high school student next fall.

Gallery: Fall 2012

Early 2012

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We are headed into Girl Scout cookie season here in San José, which means that our weekends are going to be very fully booked very soon. With that in mind, I took some time this afternoon to go through our deep pile of un-reviewed photos to bring you an astonishing collection of pictures from… early 2012.

That’s right: these Obama-era pictures are pre-middle-school, pre-Brexit, and pre-William, going all the way back to kindergarten for Joe and second grade for Julia. Turns out, the older kids were pretty cute back in the day, and they hadn’t even learned to roll their eyes yet.

Speaking of eye-rolling middle schoolers, Joe has more or less settled in at Willow Glen Middle after a few early bumps in the road. Like Julia before him, he’s taking intermediate band with Ms. Lee and getting a kick out of her vibrant and somewhat unorthodox persona as a teacher. He tried out for jazz band over the summer and didn’t make it—officially, he was told that they didn’t need any more clarinetists—and that got him a little down for a while, but he has a springtime trip to Disneyland to look forward to, where the band will be participating in a contest. I don’t think Joe is as excited about it as Julia was—he’s not really into roller coasters and thrill rides—but being on the road for a few days with his friends and classmates should be an interesting life experience for him, as long as he doesn’t get left behind in a rest stop bathroom.

Speaking of Julia, she finally really seems to have a handle on middle school life, just in time for her to start high school next year. She’s even gone so far as to join two clubs: geography club, and a dungeons and dragons group. I thought about digging up some of my old AD&D character sheets from high school and college, but decided against it; I figure that hearing all about how I used to play the same game thirty years ago is the last thing she wants.

William is cruising through his last few months of preschool before he starts transitional kindergarten next year. Unfortunately, he’s taken to copying his older brother and decrying school as “boring”, but I think he secretly loves it. He will also be starting his first year of t-ball in a few weeks, so we’ll be back to spending Saturdays at the park after a year-long break.

Gallery: Early 2012.

First Day of School 2017 & California 1982

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First Days of School

The new school year is underway, and with it comes the usual assortment of crises, drama, and schedule conflicts. I’ve included the traditional first-day-of-school pictures above; sadly, because the kids started on different days, each was taken solo, rather than together.

Joe started sixth grade at Willow Glen Middle this year, and seems to be adjusting well to the complexities of a middle school schedule. He complains that his classes are too easy, but I hope that things will pick up a bit as we get further into the semester. His one stumbling block, as usual, is organization. His Language Arts / Social Studies teacher dropped us a note a couple weeks ago asking us to work with him to get his binder cleaned up—it was, in her words, a mess. And, he’s already lost points on an assignment that he believes he turned in, but lacks any evidence supporting that assertion, because he threw out a bunch of old assignments that were crumpled in the bottom of his backpack. Still, his grades are excellent, and he’s clicking with his teachers. He even went to the first dance of the year, which seems very grown-up even if he called home asking to be picked up a little more than halfway through because it was “boring”.

There has been a bit of drama among Joe and his friends, but that’s a story for another time.

Julia is enjoying eighth grade so far at UPA, and she’s been doing a fantastic job of keeping up with her work and just getting things done. As a result, she has a lot more free time in the afternoon after school, and evenings at home are much more relaxed and pleasant; we haven’t once had to stay up past 11:00 working on an assignment due the next day. She’s looking forward to the possibility of going on the eight grade trip to Washington, DC later this year; if she’s able to make it, we’re hoping it will go better than mine did.

Finally, William kicked off his second (and final) year of preschool last week at Discovery Parent Child Preschool. He attends Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays this year with Teacher Sally, and he’s palpably excited about it every school day.

Perhaps the best part of the new school year for William is the fact that he’s finally fully potty trained. He tiptoed around the idea of using the toilet for a year or so, and then moved on to urinating in the potty with gradually increasing frequency, but actually pooping anywhere other than his diaper seemed completely out of reach for the longest time. Over the last couple months, it’s finally clicked, and he’s worn underwear full time for a few weeks now. We’ve handed off the changing table to another family and disposed of the diaper genie on Craigslist; thirteen years after Julia was born, it looks like we are finally done with diapers.

Now we just have to work on wiping.

As an extra bonus that likely interests only me, I recently scanned and cleaned up the photos I had of the Wong Family trip to California, way back in 1982. It was my first-ever plane trip, and represented the farthest I’d ever been from home. As was my wont, I developed an ear infection within the first couple days of the trip, necessitating a hurried trip to a clinic—it may have actually been the emergency room—for antibiotics. Adding to the excitement, while Dad worked at the local Motorola office, Mom took us shopping at the Vallco Mall, which is technically still open for sufficiently broad definitions of the word “open,” where the rental car’s battery died.

Looking back, the photos are a fascinating snapshot of the area 35 years ago, and it’s interesting to see how landmarks like the Winchester Mystery House, the Carmel Mission, and the mountains across the bay from Santa Clara (the Diablo Range, if I’m reading the Wikipedia article correctly) have changed over the decades. For fun, I composed a 2011 photo of Julia and Joseph in Muir Woods with a similar shot of Bill and me at a similar, if not necessarily identical, location. I love the comparison; one thing that stands out to me about the earlier photograph is our neatly pressed jeans, highlighting one small way in which the world has changed.

Muir Woods Comparison

Gallery: California 1982

Fall 2011

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Because Joe is starting middle school in about a week, it seemed only appropriate to set the time machine all the way back to Fall 2011, when he was just about to enter kindergarten. In that spirit, we’ve posted a set of pictures from that simpler time.

The gallery covers everything from the kids‘ first day of school to a quick family trip up to Point Reyes and Muir Woods, and ends with my parents’ Thanksgiving visit.

There are quite a few soccer pictures mixed in, as well, and this year was notable for the fact that both kids’ teams actually placed in the season-ending tournament. If I recall correctly (it was six years ago, after all), Julia’s team came in third in her age group, and Joe’s team actually won. Neither of them has been able to replicate that level of success in the years since.

Looking back, it’s darkly funny to remember how worried we were about the kids’ bickering at the time. Little did we know what we were in for in years to come.

Gallery: Fall 2011.

William Turns Three

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We don’t have any pictures ready to go just yet—the last couple months have been pretty hectic—but we do have a quick update on William, who just had his three-year checkup. He’s currently 3 feet and 2.74 inches tall, which makes him the tallest of the kids at three years: Julia was 3′ 1″, and Joe was just under 3 feet. William’s full height and weight history is on his personal page.

On that happy note, I suppose we have time for one quick picture, so here’s William on his birthday.

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