Dear Tobin,

Finally, finally, you get to go to baseball practice tonight.  The weather this baseball season has been just horrible, but now it seems like spring has arrived.  The forecast looks good, so I hope you get to hit the field consistently from now on.  Every practice so far has been rained- or snowed-out, or else the field conditions were too soggy from recent rain or snow to play.  Dad and Miles will be busy tonight, so I’m looking forward to taking you out to the ballpark and enjoying exactly the kind of beautiful evening a person should have for baseball.

I don’t think you know any kids on your team, but that doesn’t bother you.  You’ll make friends and do great.  You’re a very social little guy—in fact, that’s your primary motivation for going to Family Folk Machine.  You’re not hugely interested in music (though you did tell me last night that you want to take violin lessons, which terrifies me a little because I can’t help you with that at all).  You love hanging out with your FFM friends, though, especially because Ben is just as Rubik’s Cube-obsessed as you are.  You even got Miles into it, and you absolutely relish the fact that you’re more advanced at it than he is.  He sometimes comes to you for help, and something you need to work on is not gloating or going too far in your aid.  I can understand why it’s tempting—it’s not often that a little brother gets to lord his expertise over his big brother.  Still, we work on kindness every day, and that’s another opportunity.

We’ve gotten you signed up for some summer classes.  You chose mostly outdoorsy ones, about which your dad commented, “So we’re paying for him to play in the creek behind our house?”  He has a point, but there’s no way I could take you out without bringing Callum.  While I’m sure he would love it, it would be stressful for me to keep him from causing havoc or endangering his life in the creek.  It’ll be more fun for you to do it on someone else’s watch.  You love playing outside, and as long as you have on enough sunscreen, you’ll have a blast.

Your reading skills have really grown lately.  It won’t be long until you can sit down with a book and read for pleasure.  We’ll have to take some library trips this summer and find some good materials for you.  I’m sure we’ll do the library’s Summer Reading Program, so that will be good incentive.  I got some suggestions from a friend who has a son a little older than you, so I’m excited to watch you take off in that area.  For now, your favorite reading material is the manual you use to guide you through solving your Rubik’s Cube.  You still love for your dad to read Harry Potter to you at bedtime, though.

Your general nature remains the same:  cheerful, wiggly, quick to laugh and quick to recover from your occasional bad moods, tolerant of Miles’s moodiness, and high energy.  You expressed interest in running along with Miles and your dad in the Let Me Run 5K, and I warned you that you’d need to train for it, building up slowly.  We went out for a run last weekend, and I was prepared to take plenty of walk breaks and probably only get a mile or two done.  You ran for 3.6 miles without stopping, including some hills.  You were a little sore that night, but I think you were really proud of yourself.  You talked the whole time, too, shouting motivations to the rest of the family, saying hi to people we passed, and updating me on your status (“My body says stop, but my mind says go!”)  I think you’ll do fine in the 5K.  I’ll just have to remind you that you can stop when you cross the finish line.

You’re a good friend to your classmates and love social interaction.  You’d have a playdate every day if you controlled the schedule.  I don’t usually pick you up from school, since you and Miles typically walk home together, but when I do it’s fun to hear you say goodbye to your classmates.  You address each one by name.  I’d say you were a little politician, but your interactions all seem borne of genuine friendship.

Your current favorites:  Zelda and YouTube videos on the topic of Zelda, Rubik’s Cube, baseball, playing outside, pepperoni pizza, and adding to the stick collection you’re building on our front porch.  Now that the weather’s warming up, I’m planning to enlist you in some gardening, too.  You might be old enough now to be a more-helpful-than-destructive weed-puller.

Have a good month, sweetheart.  At this time next month, your kindergarten year will almost be over, and we’ll have a whole summer of adventure stretching before us.  Enjoy these last weeks of school, and keep being my favorite little dodo.

Love,

Mommy

Oh, Callum.

What’s the opposite of a banner weekend?  Or rather, the negative version?  Last weekend was certainly notable, so I guess if “banner weekend” doesn’t imply a good time had by all, we could call it that.  It seems more accurate to call it a flaming crap torch weekend, though.  It’s too distressing to hash it out here and now, because honestly I’m still recovering.  You seem fine.  Short version:  you are not potty-trained.  Not even close.  After many tears out of many sets of eyes (the saddest of which were Tobin’s, who is such an empath that he just couldn’t deal with it), we decided to back off and try it again later.

Fortunately, you don’t have any deadlines looming.  With both Miles and Tobin, we had major life events approaching (starting preschool and getting a new sibling) around this age, so we really needed to get the job done.  I don’t know if we would have tried harder if you had that kind of deadline coming—it’s hard to imagine trying any harder than we did—but in any case, it was all too traumatic to continue.

Anyway, on to happier topics.  It’s been a very good month with the exception of last weekend, so let’s revisit those a bit.

You and your brothers had the expected Easter fun, with egg dyeing, egg hunting, and candy eating.  Your egg dyeing skills currently have more enthusiasm than finesse, and more than one of the hard-boiled eggs ended up cracked.  You guys enjoyed it, though.  I think your favorite outcome of Easter was the Silly Putty Miles and Tobin got in their Easter baskets.  The bunny should have known that you would not abide being left out of such a great present.

You’re still the best eater among people in the house under five feet.  When I told you I was making “chicken bones” (your phrase for drumsticks) for dinner, you jumped up and down and shouted with excitement.  You like peeling your own boiled eggs and are particularly crazy about the marinated pork chops Skitter made when we visited.  I’ve tried to recreate the recipe, and you like it almost as much at our dinner table.

The biggest event of our month was, of course, the Florida Keys trip.  You enjoyed the biggest sandbox you’ve ever seen (aka the beach), and you spent a lot of time scooping up bucketfuls of ocean water and bringing it back to your spot in the sand to pour on things.  You love water, especially pouring it back and forth between container, so I’m not surprised you had so much fun.  You also loved the pool, shuffleboard, the many cocktail hours we celebrated, and you did a very good job on the airplane.

It’s a very good thing that this was a Keys year for us, because the weather this spring in Iowa has been just horrible.  We’ve had multiple late-season snows, and when it’s not snowing it’s been mostly rainy or otherwise gloomy.  We’ve had very few of those special treat days when it’s 65F and sunny.  Rumor has it we have some coming toward the end of this week, but with the snow that’s currently on the ground, it could be a soggy mess.  I’ve been procrastinating about getting you new snow pants and boots, because I think that surely we’re about done with the winter sludge, and I keep being proven wrong.  You have plenty of cute warm weather outfits, though.  I’m really looking forward to getting those out.

Photo by Denny

Your current favorites:  Curious George, both for bedtime stories and your stuffed toy; playing games on pbskids.org; “helping” me make dinner; playing with water in the sink (especially the kitchen sink with the sprayer, which is a disaster about 40% of the time); and giving bedtime hugs.  You especially like family hugs, wherein greater than or equal to three family members (sometimes including Curious George) gather together for a squeeze.  You’re still a big fan of cuddles, and I get lots of love from you every day.

Photo by Denny

Dare we say that now is the winter of our discontent?  That its season is passing and true spring is on its way?  I can’t promise that there won’t be more trouble coming, potty-related and otherwise, but a nice warm spell would really help move things forward.  Let’s regroup, build strength, and see what happens next together.

Love,

Mommy

Dear Miles,

“Hey, Mom.”

“Yes?”

“Look at the time.”

“It’s 3:45.”

“Yeah.  I thought you’d like that.”

Recently we’ve discovered something we both enjoy:  when interesting numeric patterns come up on clocks or other digital readouts.  I told you a while ago about how I like it when the clock says 12:51, because, in the blocky display of my treadmill and most of the digital clocks around here, it’s a mirror image of itself.  You said you like that kind of thing too, and now we’ve been pointing out consecutive numbers, numeric palindromes, and other digital quirks to each other.  You  may look like your dad, but I think we have a lot of brain overlap.

At your school, the whole month of March is dedicated to a variety of reading activities.  One of them was “mystery reader,” a time when a visitor is supposed to come to your class to read aloud.  You asked your teacher who your mystery reader was going to be, and she said she didn’t have anyone lined up.  You volunteered, and you read an original story to your classmates.  You were bursting with excitement about it and told me immediately when you got home from school that day.  Another March reading activity was to decorate your classroom door in the style of a book cover.  Your class had already picked a book, but after you were mystery reader, they decided to do the other side of the door in the style of your story.  You said the idea even came from a kid you aren’t close friends with, which was extra proof that your story was a big hit.

School isn’t going 100% perfectly.  You still have a few areas where you struggle, mostly in the mental and physical organization areas.  You still make more careless mistakes on your math tests than seems appropriate, considering you seem to understand the material.  A couple of days ago, you brought home a stack of papers dating back months.  It’s a good thing I’m active on the PTO, because if I were counting on you to get information home, we’d miss two-thirds of school events.

You definitely have the capacity for great mental organization.  For the third year running, you won the team spelling bee.  You’re a naturally good speller, but you also studied very hard.  Equally importantly, you didn’t buckle under pressure.  The spelling bee has both written and oral rounds, and when it was your turn to spell a word out loud, you spoke clearly and confidently.

You’re such an interesting pile of contradictions, Miles.  You’re shy in social situations but ace the spelling bee and are eager to volunteer to read in front of your class.  You refuse to try new foods but are going out for baseball and running club again, despite not being a naturally gifted athlete.  You’re oblivious to the hurtful way you can sometimes speak to Tobin, but you’re very sensitive to any perceived criticism from your dad.  You hate it when he wants to go over your math tests with you.

I imagine this is a normal manifestation of growing up and wanting more independence, but if we gave you all the independence you wanted, you’d never make it to school on time.  I will never understand how you can take as long as you do to brush your teeth and comb your hair (although, to be fair, your hair does require a lot of work).

You thoroughly enjoyed our biennial trip to Marathon Key.  The weather was beautiful almost the whole time, warm at the beginning and end with a cool dip in the middle.  Compared to the cold snap we’ve been having here at home (it’s 28F right now, coming into the second week of April), seventy degrees doesn’t sound so cool, but it was a bit chilly for the beach.  Fortunately, our condo’s pool was heated, so you still got plenty of water time.  You swam with utter confidence.  We could barely drag you out of the pool to eat (though you managed to enjoy meals at our favorite restaurants and grill-outs on the beach).  There weren’t a lot of kids around our condo that week, but you did make friends with a middle-aged woman who hung out by the pool a lot.  She threw baby carrots into the pool and you dived for them.  You kept it up for what seemed like hours (fortunately with good sun protection, because I don’t think you got burned at all).  You didn’t eat any of them.  It reminded me of when you were a little guy, freakishly focused and able to keep on task, if it was a task that interested you.

I’ve really enjoyed watching your confidence grow in so many areas.  It’s hard to believe that your fourth-grade year is winding down.  At least our school district runs elementary school through sixth grade, so I don’t need to start getting wound up about junior high quite yet.  Still, I know it won’t be long before I’m using this space to fret about that.  You don’t seem to have the self-awareness (yet) that leads to the crushing self-consciousness of the early teen years, and maybe your sometimes obliviousness will serve you well in that area.  I hope you can continue to find happiness and satisfaction from things like drawing comics, carrot retrieval, and finding patterns in digital displays.  Just remember that big, unpredictable things like the ocean can be pretty wonderful too.

I think you’re pretty wonderful.

Love,

Mom

P.S. Check out how many months old you are.  Cool, huh?