Dear Tobin,

You have a lot of nicknames.  There are the obvious ones, like Toby and Tobester (Miles’s favorite).  Your daddy calls you Bubs, and I call you Meatball, and Skittergramps calls you Tobinio.  The one that I’ve been finding myself calling you the most lately, though, is Sunshine-Face.  You are just such a smiler.  You smile when you wake up in the morning, you smile when Skittergramps holds you up to play Superbaby, you even smile when you get your diaper changed.  You have such a sweet disposition, and you’re so easy-going.  You sleep well, you eat well, and you love to watch your big brother do whatever he’s doing.  There’s really just one thing you do that’s outrageous, which I’ll get to in a moment.

We’re looking forward to you getting to meet your Uncle Tyler this weekend, but since I’m a couple of days late on the Tobin Times already, I’ll save the details of that for next month.  One thing I can say with confidence:  you look like him and you poop like him.  When Uncle Tyler was a baby, he made his own family legend by

[Aside:  you are sitting on my lap right now, and you just pooped.  Seriously, you pooped while I was in the middle of writing a paragraph about your poop and your pooping role model’s poop. ]

pooping up his back in the finest restaurants of San Francisco.  I don’t know how you manage to do it, but you share that talent.  It’s outrageous.  Do you have some little funnel you keep back there to direct the spray straight up?  Fortunately, I’m pretty sure Uncle Tyler developed into an individual with normal poop trajectory, so I have hope that the same can happen for you.  Maybe you guys can compare this weekend.

You had your first Halloween this month, which of course wasn’t very interesting for you.  The rest of us got a kick out of it, though.  You wore your brother’s old lobster costume for one event, then later you wore a new dinosaur costume (really just jammies with a dinosaur-looking hood).  As usual, you were a good sport as we hauled you all around the neighborhood.  People thought you were very cute.  I agreed.

One cool trick you’ve learned is “Sooooo big.”  It’s probably a combination of physical and verbal cues, but when we hold your hands and say, “How big is Tobin?”, you do a little sit-up and straighten your legs as we help you into a standing position.  You love to do that, but I think it’s hard work for you, because you never smile while you’re doing it.  And yet, every time we prompt you, you go straight into it.  Sometimes you do it when we’re not ready.  You’re very strong.  We have to keep a tight grasp on you to keep you from tossing yourself hither and yon.

It’s hard to say yet whether those tendencies will continue throughout your life, but it seems quite possible that you’ll be a daring and enthusiastic little guy.  Second kids always like to do what their big siblings are doing,  so we’re probably going to have to ramp up our vigilance to make sure you don’t get in over your head at the playground.  It could have positives, too.  Maybe you’ll want to mimic your brother in every way and you’ll be reading and using the potty when you’re 18 months old.

Right now, though, you’re asleep on my lap.  I took a little break mid-composition to change your diaper, get your brother breakfast, take a shower, and get dressed, and now we’re just snuggling.  You just did that thing babies do where you startle in your sleep, throwing your arms out.  Your little blond hairs are so fluffy.  Your eyebrows and eyelashes are almost transparent.  Your neck smells good because you don’t puke very much.

You bring me such joy, little Toby.  I don’t know what I ever did without my little Sunshine-Face.

In closing, I submit this cartoon in memory of Bil Keane, who in general was not very funny but really hit it with this one:

Love,

Mommy