Category: Kids

When my kids were graduating from high school, my wife was responsible for ordering graduations pictures.  Because she planned to display these in our bedroom, she planned to buy the classic graduation pictures, the girls in drapes and our son in a tuxedo. The plan was to eventually have one picture of each of them, all the same size with our son in the middle for a nice, balanced presentation.  My wife didn’t pay attention when she was ordering pictures for our son.  Instead of ordering an 8½” x 11” like she had for our oldest daughter, she got a 20” x 24” poster size of our son.  She didn’t realize this until the pictures came in.  She still used this large photo of our son.  She placed several different poses of our oldest daughter around the picture of our son until our youngest daughter graduated.  Her graduation pictures were the same size as her sister’s. Their various poses were placed around the giant photo of their brother.  We joked that that James is his mother’s favorite because his picture was bigger.  Several years later, we were watching the show The Goldbergs and one of the running jokes on the show was that the youngest son, who is her favorite, was obviously the favorite no matter what she said because his photo above their bed was significantly larger that their other two children. 

My son has always had a knack for jokes that almost no one else would catch.  One year when he signed up for 4-H he marked Eskimo as his ethnicity.  He regularly told other kids on the bus that his name was something other than James.  He kept up that one for at least 6 months.  No telling what tales he told his teachers to get out of work.  

At some point, my son’s hair started curling.  During his later years in elementary school, my wife was working at the school.  Some of the black boys were talking to her and one of them asked about her son.  Another boy in the group asked who her son is and the first kid said, “He goes to school here!  You know, the white boy with the afro!”

One of the joys of being a parent of my son has always been the anticipation of the pictures from school. The picture above is a good representation.  He has a mischievous look on his face that captures his spirit.  Over the years, we were entertained by each package of photos from school.  I have selected some of the more entertaining ones to share here.

My wife called me at work to tell me that our son James had been kicked off the bus.  This was when he was in intermediate school.  She said it wasn’t as bad as what it sounded.  She said that when the principal called her, he said that James didn’t need to be in trouble. He said that the only reason James was being kicked off the bus for a week was because of a zero-tolerance policy for fighting.  Here is the story that we got from the principal and James.  

My family went to church with the family of one of my best friends from college.  My friend Hugh has a son, Ethan, that is the same age as my son James.  When Ethan was about 6 years old, he invited James to his birthday party.  The party had a dinosaur theme because Ethan was fascinated with them.  They had invited about 10 boys to the party.  Ethan was the only kid that James knew at the party other than Ethan’s little brother, Eric. I stayed at the party to hang out, help out, and to make sure James was OK since he was a shy young man.

When my oldest daughter as born, there were a lot of things that didn’t have to be put away because she didn’t get into things you didn’t want her to bother.  I had a lot of music CDs that were kept on the bottom shelf of the entertainment center in our living room that she never touched.  All of that changed when my son was born.  The CDs were moved and a lot more childproofing was required at the Wheeler house. 

It was June 2, 1998.  We were celebrating my son’s third birthday.  We had cake and ice cream to celebrate.  It also took a while for my son to open presents. We gave him a while to play with his new toys before we put the kids to bed. When my wife and I finally got to bed, it seemed like it would take a while before we could settle down from the night’s activities to fall asleep. We had been in the bed about 10 minutes, the smoke detector made a sound.  It lasted longer that the chirp they make when the battery is low. But it only stayed on for 2 seconds at the most.  It was long enough that we got up and started sniffing around the house.  We found nothing wrong.  We got back in bed but about 30 minutes later, the smoke detector made the noise again.  Again, the sound lasted less that 2 seconds but longer than a chirp.  There had to be something wrong but when we got up to look, we still couldn’t find any problems. We returned to bed. We went through the same routine 30 minutes later when the alarm went off again.  This time, we reluctantly removed the battery from the smoke detector before returning to bed.