Christmas 2012

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Unforeseen circumstances have prevented us from posting as often as we’d resolved to at the start of the year, but here’s a token effort: pictures from the 2012 Christmas season.

The festivities started off with the annual Girl Scout Father-Daughter dance. We had never attended in the past, but Julia’s troop was hosting this year and Julie was helping with setup (along with all the other moms), so it would have been a bit anti-social not to attend, even by my high standards. The dance was Western themed, so the months and months of junior high P.E. I spent doing square dancing finally paid off, just like Mr. Lansdown always said they would.

We spent the holidays themselves in Chicago with my family, where the kids were overwhelmed by Santa’s largesse. As excited as the kids were by Christmas morning, Julie and I were equally passionate about the prospect of getting everything home. In as sure a sign that miracles do happen as I’ve ever seen, everything made it back to California in one piece, including our collective sanity.

While we were in Illinois, we had a number of adventures. In addition to spending some quality time with the Shidle and Sass families—probably more than they bargained for—we visited my grandparents and spent Christmas evening with my Uncle Jack and Aunt Mary and my cousins Nick and Caitlin. Later in the week, we saw the Chicago (well, Rosemont) version of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, starring the Rockettes. I was a little worried that it might be a bit beyond the kids’ ken, but it ended up being right up their alley.

At the tail end our trip, we paid a final visit to the Rolling Meadows Gino’s East, which is evidently being torn down to make room for a much-needed Panera. Aside from the fact that we love the pizza—in particular, I’m a fan of the sausage patty that covers the entire pie—its closure is depressing because, as Julie reminded me, it was the site of our first actual date. Yes, I took my future wife out for pizza on our first date. We also saw Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Has there ever been a more auspicious beginning?

At least our first date wasn’t at One Schaumburg Place.

More on the unforeseen circumstances in a bit.

Thanksgiving and Christmas Preparations

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Catching up on the last couple months, we’ve posted some pictures from Thanksgiving and the weeks leading up to Christmas.

This Thanksgiving, for the first time ever, we used our dining area (calling it a room seems more than a tad generous) for an actual meal. This tremendous step was made possible by the removal of the kids’ train table, which Julie gave away via Craigslist. Not having babies and toddlers and their associated detritus lying around the house sure is convenient! In fact, a couple weeks ago, we also disposed of the kids’ play kitchen in the same fashion. It’s a good thing that part of our lives is behind us.

Thanksgiving weekend, Julia’s Girl Scout troop headed to Christmas in the Park to decorate a tree for the second year running. The girls did most of the decorating—with a little help from some of the younger brothers—and then we headed to Downtown Ice, an outdoor ice rink set up by downtown businesses in San José. Julia had been ice skating with her class the previous year; but Joe had never tried, and I hadn’t skated since sometime around the last ice age, so things were a bit dicey for a bit. Mostly, I held Joe’s hand as we slowly made our way around the wall at the edge of the rink.

After skating, we went out to lunch, where Julia was honored as the troop’s top cookie seller for 2012. Considering the angst having to sell candy bars door to door for the Cub Scouts engendered in me when I was Julia’s age, it was a relief to see her do so well. That’s at least one area in which she’s already surpassed me.

As the season wore on, we went on a couple outings with Pierce, one of Julia’s friends from school. We decorated gingerbread houses at the San José Woman’s Club—personally, I was gravely disappointed that we didn’t get to actually eat the various treats we attached to the cookie houses. The next weekend, we went to have breakfast with Santa at the Fairmont Hotel in San José. Unfortunately, the presence of Blinky, the official mascot of Christmas in the Park, left Julia terrified, at least for a bit, but she got over it quickly enough. For some reason, there were also two guys in Star Wars stormtrooper costumes. Presumably, they were Santa’s security detail: in the post-9/11 world, it’s impossible to be too careful.

Consumed by the spirit of holiday giving, Julie and I both managed to get $40 parking tickets during the breakfast. Never let it be said that we aren’t concerned with the welfare of our fellow citizens.

Meet Stanley

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In case adopting Felix and Honey wasn’t sufficiently crazy, we decided to up the ante by adding yet another cat into our home.

Meet Stanley (his pictures are at the end of the album). He’s a three or four year old Ragdoll who was having a little trouble finding a home: Stanley has asthma and requires daily medication, which makes adoption a bit of a long shot. Julie had gone to see some kittens at a foster home for 13th Street Cat Rescue and ended up getting acquainted with Stanley instead. In fact, she spent more than two hours visiting with him and was thoroughly smitten by the time she left.

In the days that followed, we ended up getting Honey and Felix—the kids weren’t going to be denied their kittens—but Julie never gave up on Stanley. She reminded me of Ogra, a cat we saw a few times at pet stores before we were married, back in Champaign in 1998; we never seriously considered getting her because of Maggie’s highly developed sense of territory, but Julie pointed out that she still remembered her, some fifteen years later, and that it would be the same thing with Stanley if we didn’t adopt him. I found it difficult to refute that logic. By the time we called the foster home back about Stanley, the woman caring for him said that she was surprised she hadn’t heard from us sooner, given the degree to which Julie and Stanley had bonded.

As an aside, everything worked out fine with Ogra: sometime after we moved to California, spurred by Julie’s fears that something terrible had happened, I called the rescue organization back in Champaign to check up on her. She had been adopted by a nice family and was, as far as they knew, happy and healthy.

Stanley is on Flovent, which he takes through an inhaler once or twice a day. He’s not especially fond of it—we have to press the inhaler to his muzzle and hold it there for twenty seconds, which makes him a bit squirmy—but he tolerates it reasonably well. His reaction is consistent with what seems to be his overall personality: extraordinarily mellow. He spends most of his time hanging out in the back of the house, sleeping in our bed or Julia’s. He doesn’t seem to mind the kittens at all; if anything, he might be a little intimidated by their energy. I’ve never seen him move faster than a slow amble, and he almost has a slight tendency to waddle.

Felix and Honey, on the other hand, have had slightly stronger reactions. Both of them were pretty unnerved when he first arrived, despite the fact that we kept him confined to the back bathroom for the better part of his first day here to help them acclimate to one another. Over the last few days, Felix seems to have adjusted fairly well: I’ve caught him following Stanley around, trying to sniff his tail, on more than one occasion. Honey, however, still hisses when she comes face to face with him, which isn’t too much of a problem except when everyone is back in our bedroom getting ready for bed. There hasn’t been any bloodshed yet, so I’m hopeful that everyone will figure out how to get along in time.

Felix and Honey

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We’re back from an exciting trip to Chicago for Christmas, and naturally we have pictures to share and tales to tell. For now, however, the news of the day is that we’re cat owners once again.

It seems like just a couple weeks ago that we said goodbye to Maggie, but to my surprise—I had to look back at old photos to check—it’s been five months. Before Maggie died, Julie mentioned to the kids that we might think about getting kittens sometime after she was gone, the idea being that Maggie was too old to deal with energetic youngsters looking to romp and play (and she was never big on company to begin with, if we’re being completely honest about the old girl). As a result, both Julia and Joseph looked at Maggie’s illness and eventual death with a strange mix of curiosity, sadness and anticipation, with the last of those feelings unnervingly dominant. From their perspective, they never really knew Maggie in the prime of her life, when she chased about the house snarling at Loaf and chattering at birds; nor did they know her when she was a kitten, always more than willing to distract Julie and me from our homework back at Rice.

As an aside, one of my favorite memories of the last few weeks of Maggie’s life was when I enticed her—with no small amount of effort—to play an old game in which I teased her with a pen hiding under a sheet of paper, just the way we used to back in Baker. It only lasted a few minutes, but everything about it, from the way she held her paw, poised to strike, to the tilt of her head, was just the way I remembered it.

The kids, then, have been growing more and more excited about the idea of kittens. The earlier, vague conversations about doing something after Maggie died became more concrete, with Julie eventually landing on a schedule that called for us to adopt kittens right after the holidays. She wasn’t kidding around, either: we arrived back in San José on Monday, she and the kids started visiting cats on Tuesday, and we had new housemates on Saturday.

Our new friends are Honey and Felix. Naturally, we have pictures. They’re a brother and sister pair from a litter of six kittens that was left at a shelter to be adopted out or euthanized. Luckily, the folks at Unconditional Love Animal Rescue bailed them out. Honey and Felix were the smallest of the bunch by a wide margin, so they were separated from the rest and sent to a foster home together. They’re about nine weeks old, but they’re still pretty small and still very much kittens.

Unsurprisingly, they were a bit nervous when Julie and the kids first brought them home. We weren’t sure how they would react to the house or the kids; nor were we sure how they’d do with respect to the litter box, so we penned them up in the front bathroom with a baby gate on their arrival. We expected to keep them there for a day or two to help them acclimate, but Honey scaled the gate and escaped within the first few hours, and that was that. They spent the night in bed with Julie and me and managed to avoid being crushed, so they seem to be blessed with decent survival instincts.

Julia and Joe are positively ecstatic. Julia loves picking up Felix and carrying him around, whether he wants to be carried or not; Felix has been surprisingly tolerant of this new treatment. Both cats love to play, and they’ve been exceedingly accommodating of Joe’s particular style, which involves swinging a stuffed snake in the general direction of their faces in the hope that they’ll jump up and grab it.

Back to School / Julia Turns Eight

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As seems customary around these parts, Booksin Elementary posts its class lists on the Friday before school starts. Presumably, this strategy is designed to prevent parents from complaining about their kids’ classroom assignments by leaving them as little time as possible to mull them over. I’m not sure it works, however, judging by the amount of grousing we heard outside the school library where the class information was posted (No, it’s not posted online. That would be crazy).

Joe ended up assigned to Mrs. Glenn’s class. She was new to us (and to Booksin), but coincidentally, she’s teaching in Room 3, where Julia had kindergarten with Mrs. Romero. Unfortunately, she missed the first few weeks of class while she recovered from hip surgery that was performed over the summer. Thanks to silly insurance company rules, she couldn’t even come to campus during the day while kids were present until she was off disability. She’s back now, and she and Joe seem to be getting along famously, though she’s asked him to sit at the back of the class since he has a propensity to stand while he’s doing work.

Julia ended up in Mr. Alderette’s class. We heard through the grapevine that he was a bit strict (see the bit above about grousing), but so far, he and Julia have clicked well. In fact, he’s unlocked the heretofore unknown secret to motivating her: stuffed animals. He’s been giving out Beanie Babies—rechristened in this context as Brainy Babies—as rewards for completing online math lessons. So far, Julia has accumulated close to a dozen of these, and is in real danger of being squeezed out of her own bed.

We’ve posted a few pictures from the first couple months of the year, including a few from the time the kids in Joe’s class got a visit from SJ Sharkie, the San José Sharks’ mascot, to commemorate their participation in the Reading is Cool program, a monthly contest in which they track the number of pages they’ve read and the top reader in the class gets a medal at the end of the month. Joe was the winner the first month, so he got a prize from Sharkie; Mrs. Glenn was kind enough to give us a heads-up a week or so in advance, and Julie was able to be there to capture the occasion on video.

To me, the most notable thing about the clip is the fact that Julia would have been completely and utterly unable to handle it, as she’s still possessed by an unmanageable fear of mascots.

Of course, with the start of the school year comes Julia’s birthday. Grandma Flack was in town this year to help us celebrate, and we took the kids out to Benihana for a treat before opening presents at home. Naturally, there are photos. Apologies, though, for the noisy quality of some of the pictures: we’re still relying on our phones as cameras most of the time, and they didn’t do very well in the low-light conditions of our living room this time around.

Summer 2012 – Video

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In the wake of last week’s batch of pictures from the summer, we’ve put together a short video covering the same timeframe.

Julie also reminded me of an anecdote I forgot to mention last time. In the registration paperwork for Julia’s week at Camp Campbell, there was a section in which Julia could express her preferences and tastes on a number of subjects. One question asked what kind of counselor she would like. Characteristically, Julia wrote, “I would like a counselor who is not too strict.”

As the girls were unpacking after our arrival at camp, the counselors chatted amiably with everyone, trying to put the campers and their parents at ease. They asked Julia what she had put down on the form, and when she answered—a bit sheepishly—they knew exactly who she was. Julia can make an impression even before she makes an appearance.

Summer 2012

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Summer ended three months ago, and we finally have the pictures to show for it.

The kids spent most of the summer in a variety of different week-long camps run by the local YMCA: Lego Robotics, Delicious Science and Cooking, Swimming, etc. However, the big one, for Julia at least, was Camp Campbell: an actual overnight camp. Camp Campbell is where Joe and I camped with the Adventure Guides last spring, so we’d been looking for an opportunity to give Julia a chance to try it as well (though Julia ended up sleeping in much nicer accommodations than Joe and I had). The Y offers a shortened, three-day session for younger kids, and we timed it so that Julia could go at the same time as Phoebe and Zoe Dueltgen, two of her oldest friends. Somehow, Julia, her cabin-mates, the counsellors and the campground all emerged more or less unscathed, and Julia is looking forward to going back for a full week next year.

Toward the end of July—more or less the end of summer as well, because of the way the school year is set up—we traveled to Chicago to visit family and experience humidity. We succeeded in accomplishing the former goal, but utterly failed in the latter: the Chicago area (as well as much of the midwest) spent the year in the throes of a punishing drought. It was drier there—and the grass deader—than I ever remember it being.

The heat didn’t deter the kids, of course. My Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack graciously invited us over to their place to celebrate my cousin Caitlin’s 18th birthday and to swim in their pool. Julia was happy to show off the progress she’d made at swim camp over the summer, but Joe was still not 100% comfortable in the water, as the photos show.

We also made a trip to Donley’s Wild West Town, out in Union, Illinois. Donley’s has been around since 1974, but somehow it escaped our attention until this year; thus, it was new to all of us. It’s a quaint little amusement park with a few low-key rides, games and activities, pony rides and an action-packed Wild West Show that runs thrice daily.

Julia and Joe had a great time at the park, though Julia had a bit of a run-in with a fractious pair of ponies. She was the first person to line up for a pony ride in the morning, and the first pony she rode on got a little antsy toward the end of the ride. And by “antsy” I mean that the pony actively tried to throw her. To her credit, Julia was calm and collected (or merely paralyzed with fear) throughout. She even hung around to give it another shot on a different pony after Joe took his turn, but that pony also decided that it wasn’t particularly interested in carrying her—so maybe it was Julia after all. In any event, it appears that we don’t have to worry about shelling out for lessons in equestrianism any time soon.

Joe’s favorite activity at Donley’s, by far, was the canoe ride, in which riders float slowly around a circuit filled with suspiciously blue water, propelled by a current generated by unseen forces. Given a chance, Joe would likely have ridden the canoes all day long: it’s an open question as to whether he would have succumbed to sunstroke before poisoning himself by dragging his hands in the unnaturally azure waters and sucking his thumb.

Naturally, we visited my grandparents while we were in town. We were lucky to be there at the same time as my cousin Leslie, whom I hadn’t seen in many years—a bit ironically, as she lives closer to us than any of my other relatives, in Orangevale, California. In looking at the pictures from this part of the trip, you may notice that one appears to have been very heavily processed. This wasn’t an effort on my part to show off my artistic sensibilities; rather, it was the one shot that caught everyone with somewhat reasonable facial expressions, and it came out of the camera very underexposed. I did my best to salvage it with my limited skills.

There is one other photo for which I took a pretty aggressive approach to editing, but I’ll leave that one for you to identify.

On the subject of photographing uncooperative subjects, the last sequence of pictures in the set was taken by my mother on the deck in our backyard in a somewhat futile effort to get a standard, nice portrait of both kids together. I’m not sure any of them really qualify by that measure, but taken as a whole, I felt they captured the essence of the kids’ personalities and their relationship, at least on that particular day.

Captain America vs. The Candy Corn Witch

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Julia and Joseph have declared Halloween their second-favorite holiday after, of course, Christmas. Their love for holidays seems to be proportional to the total mass of the the stuff they receive in observance of the date. By this metric, Flag Day seems to be a big loser: school is usually out by the time mid-June rolls around, so they don’t even get cookies at a class party.

This year, the kids decided they had to get their pumpkin at the pop-up pumpkin “patch” in the parking lot of the light-rail station near our house. I tried in vain to convince them of the advantages of some of the more authentic alternatives—corn mazes, bunnies, working trains, etc.—but they were unmoved. The allure of the giant, inflatable shark slide they saw from the car was too much to resist.

Incidentally, the night before our trip to the pumpkin lot, we had dinner at the very same parking facility. There’s a local company, Moveable Feast, that brings together food trucks from around the area on nights and weekends. Joe, Julia and I had pretty traditional food truck fare: burritos and hot dogs. Julie, on the other hand, went all-out with a bacon cheeseburger that featured two halves of a glazed donut in place of a bun. It was a welcome change of pace—there were a ton of interesting options—and a unique experience (not to mention a convenient way for the food truck operators to make a bit of extra money outside their normal peak hours). Julie has almost fully recovered.

We picked up the pumpkin on Saturday, but didn’t get a chance to carve it until Wednesday afternoon, the day of Halloween. Julia was working on her Pitcher Pressure book report all day Sunday, and the kids were tied up with activities and errands Monday and Tuesday. With Spanish class, soccer practice and Julia’s science class, their days are far more fully booked than I remember mine being when I was either of their ages.

Scheduling concerns aside, the pumpkin did get carved, and the kids were ready for trick-or-treating by the time I made it home Wednesday night. Joe had planned to go as Spider-Man right up to the day the kids and Julie went shopping, when he changed his mind and decided he wanted to be Captain America. Julia originally thought she would re-use her Spider-Girl costume from last year, which would have conveniently allowed us to save a bit of money. Naturally, that impulse didn’t last—it never stood a chance, really—and she decided she would make up her mind at the costume store. Were she like me, this would have had the makings of a colossal disaster, but Julia found her outfit at the very first shop they visited. She elected to go as a candy corn witch, complete with a candy corn hat and a candy corn shirt. Julie even took her to get her nails done in the familiar candy corn pattern, an excursion which kept her out late on a school night, but everyone seems to have survived.

We have pictures, of course. There’s not much time to dwell on Halloween for now: the Toys ’R Us holiday catalog came in the mail yesterday, and the kids are busily circling the items they’d like Santa to bring for Christmas.

Bats ’N Balls

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It seems that book reports aren’t what they used to be. This month, Julia was tasked with reading and reporting on Pitcher Pressure by Jake Maddox. Instead of standing in front of the class to recite the dry facts about the settings, characters and plot of the book, her assignment was to invent a fictitious brand of breakfast cereal relating to the story and to design its product packaging.

Seeing as the story was set at a baseball game, Julia chose the prosaic name Bats ’N Balls for her cereal. She specifically asked whether she could use an apostrophe and N in place of “in”—she felt this was very important for the brand. We worked together to create an enticing box front and design a fun game for the back: I suggested a word search (figuring that the magic of the electronic personal computer could help us out), but Julia insisted on crafting a fill-in-the blanks puzzle with a secret message that spelled out the title of the book. The sides covered more familiar book report ground, and Julia did a great job on them on her own. You can see the final product in all its glory here.

Of course, merely creating a new product of out whole cloth wasn’t sufficient for a book report; this is the third grade, after all. To finish things up, Julia had to actually sell her creation by putting together a two-minute (give or take) commercial extolling its virtues. We won’t be able to attend her in-class presentation, but we recorded her final run-through at home for the sake of posterity.