Part One

Sitting here in the home office on a Friday afternoon, my nearly four year old son and I share a session of watching videos of fire trucks with sirens blaring loudly, on youtube. His now familiar reaction to the noise and spectacle; covering his head and cowering in fear; struck a new chord with me.  You see, Sasha is obsessed with fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances.  It’s all he can talk about some days.  I like to think given all that has happened, it is a healthy obsession and the beginning of a new phase in his life as he continues on in his recovery from that fateful day of August 9th, 2010.

For really the first time, he candidly admits that the fire truck had come to fix his “owie”. He gazes at me with almost an adult like glimmer in his eyes and points to the four inch scar on his stomach, declaring proudly that the fire engine “fixed it”.  Later that night he declares to his mother that the fire engine is coming to save all of his friends.  It is a stark reminder to me of the need to write about this story, for the accident and its effect on this family is an important event that needs to be chronicled. On this one year anniversary of the accident; I have found it within myself to tell the story in the way that it should be told; with a lucid view of these past events and with a heart free of malice.

You see, on a clear sunny August afternoon, a little bit after 1:00pm on a Monday to be precise; Sasha and his grandmother were struck down having almost completed their transit across a well marked crosswalk right outside our home in Kirkland Washington.

An elderly lady of 92 simply was not aware of her surroundings and plowed into the two unabated.  The vehicle severely injured Sasha’s grandmother Tamara at impact, and then continued until one of the front tires had pinned Sasha to the ground by his abdomen. There was a mad scramble with a bystander to the accident assisting, that had the woman struggling to put the car into gear and get it off of the boy, with a difficult to imagine rocking back and forth until the car was free. The police report includes details of the witness describing Sasha as turning blue, and of a moment of sheer panic and dread for Sasha’s survival as the driver struggled to find the right gear.

Sasha suffered internal injuries and had to be rushed to Harbor View, the hospital in the Seattle area best prepared to deal with trauma.  Meanwhile, his grandmother Tamara was rushed to a different hospital closer to the scene of the accident.  There was an immediate rush to get everyone to the boy down at Harbor View, which included a high speed transit of I-405 and 520 in a high performance police cruiser that I will truly never forget.

This blog will chronicle the events that followed the initial trauma in a series of posts in the coming weeks. Today cannot and should not be about the details of the accident, for as we look back at this past year, we must be thankful for the love and the support everyone has shown us.  We must be equally thankful for the grace that God has poured upon us; for we would be fools not to recognize his hand in keeping us safe and in speeding our recovery.  Who would we be if we did not give our thanks and praise to the Almighty?

Angela and I are so grateful for all the well wishes, gift cards, hugs and kisses, and concerned conversations that have poured out from all of you.  We felt a tremendous wellspring of care and concern from our friends immediately following the accident, not just here in Seattle, but from all over the world.  While in the hospital with Sasha, we received gifts from as far as overseas, from places like New York, and from here at home. Your gift certificates for simple things like groceries and coffee were so prescient and revealed to us in a tangible way just how thoughtful and caring you our dear friends truly are.  We would have simply stopped eating, and it still amazes us to this day that you worried about our immediate health while we struggled with the emotion.

Tanya’s frequent trips to see us, with balloons and toys for Sasha, her kind smiles and gracious hugs at the most precious of times, were simply amazing.  The timing of her visits stunned us; she seemed to come at the times we were the most vulnerable. While we juggled work obligations and two different hospitals with two severely injured family members; miraculously Tanya seemed to be with us at those very moments we needed to be apart.

There are many more people to thank; Angela and I are touched by the outpouring from all of you and I speak for our immediate family when I express a deep level of gratitude and appreciation to you all.  We love you all and will never forget the consistent and unconditional outpouring of love and support; we credit all of you as being an essential part of our gradual but consistent recovery as a family.

Certainly health issues as well as psychological effects continue to persist.  Sasha continues to struggle with food digestion (a third of his Pancreas was amputated), and Tamara is still in quite a bit of pain from the multiple fractures she sustained.  Tamara and Sasha will struggle with the effects for some time to come.  Sasha is enrolled in a special needs program at Bell Elementary, but is still at home with me the rest of the time.  He and I have become very close, and while it has been tough on us financially for me to be at home all the time, Sasha and I have grown together as human beings. He reminds me often that I am his “best friend”.  Part of my story is that I never knew my real father, so if I am honest; the amount of time I spend with my son has a healing effect on both of us.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder continues to profoundly effect Sasha and he understands in a vivid and intelligent way what has happened to him. He awakes from nightmares of cars hitting him on a weekly basis.  This is really the part that is toughest for Angela and I to take, as often the nightmares are accompanied by digestion problems with the inevitable stomach pain for little Sasha to endure throughout the night.  Angela sadly endures a lot of heartache and sleep loss sitting with Sasha, holding and comforting him at the darkest hours in the early morning.  This is when she is the most alone, and this is when I am truly the saddest and experience the deepest level of darkness in my own heart; for she does not know that often I am awake with them, remaining quiet in the other room weeping and praying.

Yet it is impossible to know Sasha today and not recognize a heroic sense of purpose in the boy.  He really is the nicest person I know.  In sort of an ironic twist on the whole concept of the “role model”, Sasha Tchobanenko has become my hero. He always has a kind word, is very concerned about other people, and has an unusual sense of empathy for the world at such a young age.  Yes, he struggles with fear, but it’s a lucky coincidence that I am his father; as I have had to over come a very difficult period and can help him in the proper way to slowly chip away at the fear and confusion.  We make daily progress.

Angela continues in the Treasury Department at Starbucks and as an Analyst.  She finds Starbucks both challenging and rewarding, and as a result of her experiences there has been a pillar of strength for our family for many months.  I do not know another woman whom posses her combination of strength, selflessness, innate sense of caring as a mother, and determination to succeed.  Starbucks is extremely supportive of Angela and her career goals and this healthy and supportive work environment in these tough economic times has truly been the key to our survival and recovery as a family.  I feel I owe a personal debt of gratitude to Starbucks the organization, for they are truly kind and caring people.

As for me?  Well, while my little creative agency did not weather this storm, a new venture has taken its place and I am hard at work on product development.  Five of us have come together in a partnership, and we are fortunate to have been able to invest together with our partners in the start-up and in our first product.  We have ambitious aspirations, including foundation work with a charter that is inspired by our own experiences with the accident and by Sasha himself.

Indeed the new company is named after the boy; Sashaco Incorporated.  We have a clothing product in development and will be retailing it online by this winter.  The for profit company will help fund and support a new foundation, The Sashaco Foundation, which will be dedicated to helping families that are going through challenges similar to what we went through.

So yes, it is time to tell the story.  Sasha’s story; Tamara’s story; indeed the story of the challenges this family has experienced and the ultimate success story of us coming together and healing.  We understand that we have been blessed, understand that worse tragedies have befallen other families.  But yet, we are in this, it was our particular challenge and it is appropriate to share this story with all of you.

In the coming weeks I hope you all will read about some of the specifics of what has happened this past year, and will be inspired and informed.

One thing is worth mentioning here; I did spend a lot of time looking at “theme frameworks”, including the one referenced in the above article.  But in the end, I’m not really comfortable with trusting someone else’s work, or worse, using it and not understanding it.  I’ve really decided to understand from top to bottom how to custom theme WordPress, and again, Ian’s article so far is my favorite.  It takes you through the entire process, and even gives a link to the code to download.  While it may not be written for WordPress 3+ and the new theming features, for what I needed to do here it was perfect.  Perhaps Ian will update it with support for the new features soon.

So this post won’t be about specifically how to code one up, but rather the process that I used, and the process that maybe you should think about using, to create a new theme:

1. Pay attention to the current state of WordPress. At the time that I wrote this, latest version just added lot of features that affects some of the process of theming.  I don’t actually use any of these features on this site, but I did take the time to understand what they were and if I needed them before I went into development.
2. Plan out what you intend your blog to be used for. A photo blog will have different design goals then say, a blog that will mostly be written articles and fewer images.
3. Decide on how you plan to blog. This might seem trivial, but, in the case of my blog, I’m the only one that is going to ever post to it.  This meant that there were certain features that I didn’t need in my theme, such as an author archive or even any kind of author label on the content as every article published is written by me.
4. Decide on how you plan to display articles. My blog is designed around the idea that only one article at a time is displayed on any given page.  That’s not always the best way to display a blog, for example if there are multiple authors, or if you want to display links to more than one article on the front page.
5. Work with a formally trained designer. This is key, and overlooked too often.  You want to work with a designer that is able to listen to the way you want your blog to work, look at some other blog templates to get an idea of what needs to be designed, and then execute on a bespoke design for your blog.  The design should be delivered in PSD format with all of the pages designed in grouped layers. Any fonts used will also need to be purchased, so that you are legally displaying them on your site.  Here is an excellent resource for communicating to a designer the different parts and pieces of a WordPress blog theme.  If your designer understands CSS, all the better, as you can also deliver to them the WordPress CSS that needs to be styled.   Here is a screenshot of my blog theme in Photoshop.
6. Make sure you’ve got all your tools and services identified, licensed, and up-to-date.  Each developer is different, but I use the following tools: Adobe Photoshop, Eclipse Helios, Firebug, Pixel Perfect, XAMPP, Subversion, FileZilla, Dreamhost Web Hosting, and Windows Live Writer.
7. Mockup your design outside of WordPress onto a prototype site using web standards, and test the markup and css for compliance. You do this so that you can test the basic layout across all the major browsers as well as make sure that your site design lays out properly before attempting to get it into a theme.  The markup for a theme is complex, as the layout gets broken up into a series of PHP files, if you don’t have your theme layed out before hand, you can spend a lot of time chasing layout issues that may not have anything to do with WordPress.
8. And finally, build two versions of your theme; a local/test version on a separate install of WordPress, and the actual live site.  The local test version allows you to test changes, test blog posts for accuracy, and in general, experiment with plugins and other changes you wouldn’t want to implement without a sanity check.  Happy Theming!