Mom’s 65th Birthday / Training

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Turning our attention back to the halcyon days of 2009, here’s a set of photos highlighting my mom’s 65th birthday. For the occasion, my dad arranged for the two of them to travel to San José, and for Bill and Leah to fly in from Colorado Springs. For some reason, Joe spent part of the visit dressed up in one of Julia’s old Disney Princess outfits; we’ll need to keep those pictures handy in case he steps out of line as a teenager.

In other exciting news, Julia hit a big milestone yesterday: she went with Julie to Nordstrom to be sized for her very first training bra. Needless to say, she was extremely excited to take this step, and throughout the afternoon, she happily switched among the three bras she brought home. For the first hour or so, she complained a bit that it was uncomfortable, but by the end of the day, she hardly noticed it was there. For obvious reasons, we’re not posting pictures.

On the topic of training, we finally took the training wheels off of Joe’s bike a couple weeks ago. All things considered, he’s doing pretty well. He was up and balancing on his own a few tries after the wheels came off (though he certainly had plenty of practice with them on). We’re still trying to work out the kinks around turning—so far, we’ve only gone around the block counter-clockwise—but he will definitely be speeding around the neighborhood by himself by the end of the summer.

Father’s Day and Julia at Camp Campbell

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Taking a break from ancient history for a bit, we’ve uploaded a new set of pictures from the last few weeks. The photos cover our Father’s Day dinner at Paxti’s in Campbell and Julia’s summer camp week at YMCA Camp Campbell. Somehow, we managed to avoid having any pictures of Joe in this batch.

This was Julia’s second visit to Camp Campbell: last year, she went for a three-day mini-camp, and this year she signed up for a full, week-long session. Like last year, she went with her good friends Phoebe and Zoe Dueltgen and they stayed in the comparatively luxurious Treetop cabins, which have heated floors, windows and lights for each bunk, and attached indoor bathrooms. Apparently the more rustic cabins that Joe and I have stayed in during our Adventure Guides trips are reserved for the older kids, who stand a better chance of fighting off bears as they stumble to the standalone bathroom facilities in the dark.

One of the highlights of the week for Julia was the night she and her cabin-mates slept out under the stars. The cabin counselors, Shelby and Kate, rounded up the girls and their sleeping bags and marched them out into the woods to spend the night outdoors. It’s not exactly clear how far they went—it can’t have been that far, right?—but evidently it was far enough that the counselors couldn’t easily walk Julia back to the cabins when she announced that she needed to use the bathroom. Thus, along with her first time sleeping under the stars, Julia was able to notch another personal first: peeing under the stars.

If you look carefully at the camp pictures, you’ll note that Julia seems to be wearing the same pair of polka-dot pants on at least three different days, while other kids are wearing shorts. It should also be noted that Julia’s week at camp coincided with a long stretch of some of the hottest, least California-like weather we’ve experienced since we moved out here in 1999. As far as we can tell, the counselors seem to have advised the kids that long pants were a good idea in order to avoid tick bites and other mishaps that can occur in a forested setting. Julia seems to have taken this guidance to heart: hence the repeated appearances of the pants over the course of the week. Fortunately, she’s not one to be unduly traumatized by temperature extremes. I only wish that she listened that well to us.

Mixed in with the Father’s Day and camp photos are a few quick and dirty snapshots I took at the lone open Vista Point along Interstate 280 between our house and San Mateo. I used to drive past this spot every day during my 45-mile commute to the office, and has never stopped. As unpleasant as spending hours every day in the car was, one thing the drive had going for it was the gorgeous scenery. In this picture, you can see Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir, which sits directly atop the San Andreas Fault.

A Lonesome Baker Men Addendum

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I forgot to include one brief anecdote in the previous post regarding our visit to Texas, so I thought I’d write it up now, while it’s on my mind.

If you’ve looked at the pictures, you know that the tail end of the trip included a group bath for some of the younger kids: Julia, Joe, Laura, Kay and Kate. Joe was, obviously, the only boy in the group, a fact that went largely unnoticed and unremarked upon until Kate adorably piped up, “Joe-Joe has a tail!”

That was cute enough on its own, but Julia, never one to let a misconception slide by, responded, “No! That’s his penis!”

Fortunately, the conversation pretty much ended there.

Lonesome Baker Men 2009

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Baker

Continuing our jaunt through the distant past, we’ve posted a new set of photos. These pictures, which are almost exactly four years old today, date back to our 2009 trip to Texas to visit friends from Rice at Dave and Rebecca Hyatt’s house in The Woodlands. Joe and Erica Shidle flew in from Chicago with Laura and Kay; Mason and Kathy Hart trekked across town from their place in Houston with their son Dylan; and Paul Williams drove in from Belton, Texas with Zane and Diana—sadly, his wife Joanna couldn’t make it. That, or she wisely chose to stay far away from the potentially explosive gathering.

Four years out, a couple things about the trip stand out in my memory. First, Houston was every bit as hot as I remembered it, and perhaps even more so. Second, Dave and Rebecca have a great pool, complete with a robot that cleans it automatically overnight, and they were fantastic about opening their home to fourteen people—seven adults and seven children—most of whom stayed overnight for several days. Somewhat miraculously, the structure was still largely intact when we departed.

As you can see from the photos, we took the opportunity to visit our old stomping grounds at Rice while we were in town. The campus has grown dramatically since we all graduated, but all the same, there were many aspects that seemed nearly untouched by the intervening years. Sadly, Baker College, where we all (except Rebecca) lived was undergoing remodeling and expansion at the time, so we weren’t able to go inside. I’m told that the facade is nearly unrecognizable since the completion of construction in 2010.

Prior to this trip, the last time everyone got together was in 2004, so if we want to stick to an every-five-years cadence, we’ll have to plan something for next summer. Assuming we pull it off, you can look for the pictures sometime in 2017. Of course, at least three more kids will have been added to the mix by that time, so the choice of venue may be a significant sticking point.

In case you were wondering, the titles of this post and the associated album are a reference to an unfortunate photo and caption that appeared in the Rice Thresher during my senior year. For the record, three of the five guys pictured had girlfriends at the time of publication.

Joe Turned Three

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In honor of Joe’s recent seventh birthday, we’re taking this opportunity to post heretofore unpublished photos from his third birthday, all the way back in 2009. The set includes a number of highlights, not least of which is the awesome cake Julie made in the shape of a dinosaur train.

This update also includes Joe celebrating wearing his first pair of big boy underpants. That day, when we thought we were done with diapers once and for all, was a happy day indeed.

In more recent news, the additional time I’ve been afforded to spend with my family has been productive. We moved a tremendous quantity of books, mementos and other artifacts up to the attic this week, and are finally getting close to being ready to paint Joe’s room. We also took the training wheels off of Joe’s bike last weekend; we’ll have a post with pictures shortly, but he’s getting the hang of it as long as we stick to left turns and don’t ask him to brake.

Julia Tries T-Ball

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Following up on my earlier threat to keep posting pictures, here’s a a set highlighting Julia’s first season of t-ball, four years ago this past spring. Back then, Julia was in Junior K at Action Day Primary Plus, and her team’s practices were right after school, which made our lives much simpler. It was our first time doing a team sport with either of the kids, and we hit all the bumps in the road you might expect, particularly considering Julia’s spirited personality, but Coach Longcore was great with the kids and showed the patience of a saint.

Fun fact: Julia still wears her Mariners jersey today.

Spring 2013 / Joe’s Seventh Birthday

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Seeing as I’m going to have a lot of time on my hands all of a sudden, it seems like an opportune time to get caught up on some pictures. So, off we go.

First, Julia’s spring school portrait came in, and you can find it in her class picture album. The spring portraits are taken in front of a green screen—the school didn’t actually haul the kids out to a woodland stream for the photo shoot—so we can provide alternate versions with different, equally unlikely, backgrounds if you like.

You might notice that there’s no corresponding spring portrait for Joe. As it turns out, when his teacher, Mrs. Glenn, asked the kids who were scheduled to have their pictures taken to line up, he misunderstood and, well, didn’t. He was very apologetic when he came home, thinking that Julie and I would be upset. Secretly, however, I was probably just as happy to get the check we’d written back un-cashed, especially in light of recent developments.

There’s also an entirely new album, covering various events of this spring and Joe’s seventh birthday. Quite a bit has happened over the last few months: Julia had braces put in and played the trumpet in the inaugural Booksin band—there are pictures of the end-of-year concert in the album. Of course, Julia privately admitted that sometimes she doesn’t bother pressing the buttons on her trumpet as she’s playing, but she’s performed Hot Cross Buns at home and sounded a lot better than I would.

We let Joe choose where we went out to eat to celebrate his birthday, and he chose to go back to Benihana, where we took Julia last year. Unfortunately for Joe, because his birthday was on a Monday night—and the night of the band concert—we actually went out the night before and saved cake and presents for after the show.

Both kids survived the 2012–2013 school year and are headed into summer camp starting next week; in spite of my recent change of employment status, we decided to leave them signed up for camp for the time being in order to minimize the amount of disruption they perceive. We’ll re-evaluate as the situation evolves.

Joe had a great year, though he did manage to force a second consecutive teacher into retirement. All told, three of the six teachers Julia and Joe have had at Booksin have retired immediately after having our kids in their classes. Mrs. Glenn was fantastic, however, and Joe thoroughly enjoyed first grade; he ended up being the class champion for the “Reading is Cool” program, which counts the number of pages the kids read at home during the school year. His handwriting, on the other hand, is pretty atrocious, much as mine was at his age. Julie has vowed that he’s going to spend a fair portion of the summer practicing.

Julia had a very Julia year. She continued to excel academically: she was one of only two students in Mr. Alderette’s class to finish the online math drills the school makes available, and she is reading well above her ostensible grade level. Her favorite after-school activity by far has been the GATE science program, a fact that brings a smile to this IMSA alumnus’s face.

On the other hand, Julia has continued to demonstrate her spirited nature in the classroom and at home. As well as she’s done in school, her greatest achievements have come in the realm of sheer cussedness. At one point, Mr. Alderette was actually sending home weekly progress reports on the level of disruption Julia was causing in class. Things seem to have come under control by the end of the year, but we’ll see when we review the kids’ report cards.

The aforementioned computerized math program, IXL, provides another amusing—if only in hindsight—example. Julie really, really wanted Julia to complete the third-grade sequence by the end of the year. Julia, for her part, was less driven to finish, but for the fact that Mr. Alderette would occasionally set up challenges in which the kids would receive Beanie Babies, which he called Brainy Babies, for finishing a certain number of lessons. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that we didn’t really start pushing for Julia to finish until the second half of the school year—and, if we’re being honest, the latter portion of the second half of the year—so the effort was tremendously backloaded, which the majority of the work being done in April and May.

As you can imagine, this resulted in a highly combustible environment, with all parties behaving at times in ways that made none of us proud. I honestly feel that actually getting Julia to sit still, concentrate and double-check her work was more effort than the math itself. Nevertheless, she finished—aided by the fact that Julie also set out the promise of Brainy Babies—just a couple days before the end of the year. We’re left with a house full of Beanie Babies and hopefully minimal psychological damage for all concerned.

Julia herself commented on the situation in the context of a class project in which she was asked to write a letter to Fern from Charlotte’s Web. In her letter, Julia asked Fern how she felt about her frequent visits to Wilbur the pig at her uncle’s nearby barn. She then went on to explain that were she in Fern’s shoes, she would not be able to visit as often as she might like, because her mother forces her to do at least 100 hours of IXL every night.

Into Darkness

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Captain Joe

After seeing Star Trek Into Darkness this afternoon, Joe picked out a very special outfit to wear to bed. Not shown: the black trousers he pulled out of his pants drawer.

He didn’t like the “head cracking guy,” though. And he probably won’t be able to keep Ricardo Montalban and Benedict Cumberbatch straight for the rest of his life.

Easter… 2009

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If Julia had been a college freshman when the photos I’m posting tonight were taken, she’d be finishing up final exams and getting ready for graduation now. Assuming, that is, she wasn’t held back by her crippling fear of mascots, which shows no signs of abating. In fact, she cheerfully told me she spent most of this week’s school spirit assembly about the fundraiser at the San José Giants ballpark in the school office, out of fear of Gigante, the Giants’ mascot. To be completely fair to Julia, he does look pretty creepy.

Yes, the kids had an assembly this week to fire them up for a fundraising event. Apparently, the bar for assemblies is pretty low: last week, the third, fourth and fifth graders had one get them in the right frame of mind for the CSTs—yes, they have pep rallies for standardized tests nowadays. If only we’d been so lucky back when we had to take the Iowa Tests. Instead, our teachers had to make sure they left time for students to clean the hand-cranked mimeograph machines.

Of course, none of the foregoing has anything to do with the pictures, which cover the winter and spring of 2009, with an emphasis on Easter and a day trip we took to see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands. This short jaunt was notable for the fact that Joe dropped his water bottle—featured prominently in a couple of the photos—off the bridge and into the ocean. This loss has stuck with him, to the extent that he still mentions it when we drive over the bridge to this day. For a time, he was convinced that we could drive back and find it, not knowing that he’d made an unwitting contribution to the eighth wonder of the world.

Unforeseen Circumstances

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I mentioned something about “unforeseen circumstances,” in that last post, no? Well, as it turns out, Julie is pregnant, with a due date of around September 19. At our age, and under our circumstances, it doesn’t get much more unforeseen than that.

We found out about a month after Christmas, and morning sickness commenced more or less immediately following the positive test result. As with Julia and Joseph, Julie has been effectively overwhelmed by nausea the whole time. We are hoping it might ease up as the pregnancy progresses, but given Julie’s past experience, we’re not that optimistic. She’s been on disability for the past month-and-a-half, so we’ll see how things go when that runs out.

Things have changed a great deal since Julie was pregnant with Joe. Since Julie is well past what used to be the magic age of 35, we assumed going in that she would have to undergo amniocentesis, which poses not insignificant risks for the fetus, not to mention the fact of the giant needle. As it turns out, however, that’s no longer the case: through a combination of blood tests and ultrasounds, Julie’s doctors can learn pretty much everything they previously would have learned from amniocentesis, without all the stabbing.

One optional component of the screening is a new procedure, cell-free fetal DNA testing, that looks at DNA of the baby found floating in the mother’s blood. A small amount of blood is drawn and sent to a lab, where millions of scraps of fetal DNA are analyzed via computer. Based on the proportions of different chromosomes found in this pile of data, doctors can effectively (but not completely) rule out serious chromosomal disorders like Down Syndrome or Trisomy 18, without the risks presented by more invasive procedures.

It’s all pretty magical stuff: the Wired article linked to above estimates that as many 1,000 miscarriages of healthy babies result from amniocentesis and other procedures; many of those could be eliminated by cell-free DNA testing. The one downside is that many insurance policies, including ours, don’t cover the test. We were fortunate to be able to afford to pay for the procedure out-of-pocket.

All the tests so far have come up normal, and the ultrasounds show that everything is coming along according to plan. We’ve posted a few pictures, and hope to have a clip of the baby’s heartbeat online soon.

For the record, thanks to the DNA tests and high-resolution ultrasounds, we know the baby’s sex, but my mother wants to be kept in the dark, so we’re avoiding mentioning it here for the time being.