Dear Callum,

This month we resumed our normal school-year schedule, which for you mostly involves riding along to your brothers’ activities.  You definitely miss them when they’re at school, but you’ve adjusted pretty well, and we have fun on our own adventures.  You have lots of friends at Hy-Vee, especially the bakery ladies, whom you charm by always saying “thank you” after you raid the free cookie tray.  You like examining the wares at the Co-op during Miles and Tobin’s piano lessons, playing with the renewable energy display at the Rec Center during Tobin’s taekwondo classes, and hanging around in front of school to wait for them on days we go pick them up.

The weather has been mostly dismal lately, so we haven’t gotten as much outside time as you prefer.  We’ve had so much rain that many of the tomatoes in our garden have burst unpleasantly.  I can save some of them but not all of them, which is a bummer because harvesting garden produce is one of our favorite things to do together.  The cucumbers are still growing, though, so I know you’ll be happy to pick those with me. The forecast for the next week or so is good, so we’ll have to make sure to get out.

You had your stage debut last weekend, when you and your brothers and I did a performance at an art opening of our original song, “The Exploring Baby.”  Since you were the inspiration for that song, it was only natural that you participate.  You held your ukulele and bellied right up to the mic.  Technically it was an instrumental mic, but since you’re about the same height as the average guitar, it worked fine for you.  I couldn’t see you well from my vantage point at the piano, but a friend told me later that you really had the timing down well.  He said you stepped up at all the right moments, and while he couldn’t tell if you were singing or not, you had clearly been part of the rehearsal process.  We also performed “Pop Fly,” and we worked on it a lot at home.  This morning I was playing something else on the piano, and you said to me, “It’s time to stop that.  We should do ‘Pop Fly.'”

You’re definitely three, smack dab in that stage of wanting control over everything in your world and getting very frustrated when your wishes cannot be.  I try to let you assert your will when it’s reasonable (e.g., building enough travel time into our schedule that you can climb in and out of your car seat on your own), but sometimes you want to do things that are unsafe or infeasible under the circumstances.  Those are not your best moments.  Luckily I can still overpower you.

The biggest change in your life this month has been your transition to the bunk bed.  You don’t stay in there all night every night—pretty often I see you at the foot of my bed at some point during the night, and you come in to join your dad and me.  I know you won’t do that forever, so I don’t mind too much, although I definitely sleep better when you’re in the bunk bed.  As Miles noted in the bridge section of “The Exploring Baby” that he wrote just for our recent performance, “[You] like to kick Mom in the night.  [You] really like to do it.  It just feels right.”  Many nights, though, you do stay in there with Tobin, and you do fine despite the weird gymnastics you two do.  The position in which you go to sleep has very little relationship to how I find you in the morning.

Your potty training has been going mostly well.  You have a problem with delaying a bathroom visit too long and ending up with a leak.  We’ve talked and talked about how you have to listen to your body and go before it’s an emergency, but it remains an issue.  Still, I know you’re on track to full bathroom competence.  We’re down to our last couple of Pull-ups that we use overnight, and I don’t see any reason to buy another pack.  I’m not sure if Tobin agrees that it’s a low-risk proposition, but I think you’re ready to sleep in underpants.  In any case, we have a waterproof mattress protector on every bed in the house (my number one tip to all new parents, by the way).

Your current favorites:  card-boiled (hard-boiled) eggs, Silly String, pushing the little shopping carts at Trader Joe’s, cinnamon toast, taking showers with whichever brother will have you, and your bedtime hug ritual.  No matter how much you and your brothers irritate each other during the day and evening, you never begrudge them a big hug before we turn out the lights.  You don’t always agree with my “final pee” suggestion, but you never want to eliminate the hug part of the last minutes of the day.

I love you, my sweet boy.  Thank you for all the hugs.

Love,

Mommy