Happy 100 months, my little Tobin!  We raised a glass in your honor when we went out to dinner on your true 100-month birthday, but in this crazy time of year, that’s all the celebration we managed.  In fact, with the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, I’m just now on Christmas day getting this written, but I’ll save the holiday sum-up for another post.  Things are going to be getting wilder before they get calmer; by this time next month, we’ll probably be living in our loaner house while ours is under construction.  Fortunately it’s not far away, so it won’t be a big deal to get you to school and check on progress (and pick up items we forgot to pack).  You are excited about the whole deal, mostly because it’s fun and exotic to live at your friend’s house when he’s not there.  Best of all, they have a laundry chute.  You’ve thrown a few balls down that already.  Callum is nervous about the changes, Miles seems pretty neutral, your dad is stressed about the project details, and I’m stressed about your dad being stressed about the project details, but you’re ready to rock-and-roll.  You are pretty much always ready to rock-and-roll.  As Callum wondered aloud about you, “Why does he never get tired?”

I’ve been talking to you a lot lately about your tendency toward pot-stirring.  You are very intuitive and can easily read people and situations.  That’s a great power, but you need to be very careful about using it for good and not evil.  You always know exactly what will annoy your brothers (mostly Miles, but Callum too), and you have a very hard time resisting pushing their buttons.  Sometimes it’s all in fun, or at least it starts that way, because you enjoy the attention and interaction with them.  Too often, though, it descends into genuine fury on someone’s part.

You and Callum have also been doing a lot of physical rough-and-tumble play lately.  I guess it’s good that you’re forging your own relationship with him.  Callum and Miles have long enjoyed doing quiet things together, but you’re more of a high-energy person, and you and Callum get a kick out of pretend-fighting and doing Pokémon attacks on each other.  That’s okay to some extent, but much like your pot-stirring, often it goes too far and someone ends up crying.

I think you’re a thrill-junkie on many levels, and you need a lot of physical and mental and emotional stimulation to keep yourself satisfied.  That can be very tiring for the rest of us, but it seems to serve you well.  You always have plenty of friends, and wherever you go, you jump right into the action.  I noticed that a lot of my pictures of you are of you eating, I think because that’s the only time you sit still enough for me to capture a photo.  I promise, readership, that you do more than eat ice cream.

You’ll start your basketball season next month, which will be a good energy outlet.  You’ve also kept up taekwondo and are doing well at it.  You don’t seem to have much interest in testing for the next belt, but you get good workouts and of course have friends in the group.  You’re very competitive, so I could see you wanting to participate in tournaments or maybe the Iowa Games in the future.  I’ll let you take the lead on that one, though.

Nana very generously granted our Christmas wish of a swim-with-dolphins experience, which we’ll do when we’re in the Florida Keys this spring.  The Dolphin Research Center is very near where we’ll be staying, and they seem like a really solid non-profit organization dedicated to conservation and scientific advancement.  I really hope you enjoy it, and I think you will, due to your animal-loving nature.  You’re a good swimmer, too.  I did it once by myself, and it was so cool sharing a space with the dolphins.  I can’t wait to see how much you love it.  You are currently saying you want to be a marine biologist, which I support in terms of coolness, but I’m afraid it would take you awfully far away.  You tell me you’ll buy me a condo next door to yours near whichever ocean you end up studying.

Your current favorites: being dramatic about everything, playing with Pokémon cards, watching Scooby Doo videos, pepperoni pizza, the Series of Unfortunate Events series that you read at bedtime with your dad, and generating excitement in any situation.  Much like your brother did around this age, you are currently resisting haircuts.  I do think you look better with your curls tamed a bit, but it might also be an interesting experience to see just how tall and wild your mop can become.

I admire your enthusiasm and zest for life, Tobin.  Your joy is contagious, and it’s hard not to be happy with I hear your easy, genuine, and frequent laugh.  Just remember to use your powers responsibly and keep in mind that not everyone sees life as one big comedy opportunity.

I love you, you little nut job.  Here’s to 100 more months and beyond.

Love,

Mom

Dear Callum,

Holy crumbs, Callum.  You’re almost five.  You’ve been learning and growing so much lately, I guess it makes sense, but it’s still hard to believe.  Preschool has been such a great experience for you.  You’ve been sounding out words, learning new songs and games, and doing this thing called “subitizing.”  That was something I’d never heard of until we had your fall conference last month, but your teacher explained that it’s the skill of recognizing the quantity of something at a glance.  In your classroom, you do it by saying the number of fingers a teacher is holding up without counting them individually.  I’m very glad your teacher explained it, because when we were having our bedtime chat the other night and you asked to subitize, I knew what to do.  You held up five fingers on one hand and four fingers on the other.  You like it when I guess wrong a couple of times before landing on the right answer, so I suggested seven…then six…then nine.  As it turned out, you were pretty sure you were holding up eleven fingers.  I hope you keep working on that in school, along with some basic human anatomy.

At your conference, your teacher said you were doing very well both academically and socially.  She said you’re comfortable playing with any of the other kids in the class, but you’re also good at playing on your own.  That makes sense considering your life circumstances; your whole life has been a pretty even mix of being the only kid in the house (when your brothers are at school) and having playmates around (when they’re home).  It’s a good quality to be equally good at being alone and being with others, so I’m glad you’re doing well at it.  Your teacher said that an area you need to work on is staying engaged with the class.  She said you can sometimes get interested in your own thoughts or something other than what the class is doing and wander off, whether physically or just mentally.  I’ve noticed that at home, too.  Sometimes I’ll ask you a direct question about something pertinent to the immediate situation (e.g., “What do you want for lunch?”), and you’ll either not answer at all or answer on a totally different topic that you find more interesting.  Your hearing has tested at normal levels, so I don’t think it’s that.  I think you sometimes just get preoccupied with your own interests and have trouble forcing yourself back to the task at hand.  We’ll keep working on it.

Your teacher also said that you need to work on your independence in terms of getting shoes, coat, and snowpants on.  That’s probably our fault to some extent.  With three kids, we’re always scrambling to get out the door to go somewhere, and we often don’t budget the necessary time to let you do those things on your own.  It’s just so much faster in the short term to do them for you.  You do like to do things on your own, so it’s an assignment for me to plan ahead enough that you can get more practice doing your own work.

Your teacher said that you’re very sweet and they love having you around.  I can understand that very well.  Right now, as a matter of fact, you are watching a video next to me on the couch while I write this.  Out of nowhere, you crawled up behind me and gave me a big hug.  You’re a cuddly little guy, and I’m so happy you like to squeeze me.

You’ve been sick a lot since starting preschool, including a bad—oh, you just gave me the nicest unsolicited kiss on the cheek—cough and fever that kept you home from school two days this week.  Those sweet kisses are probably why I have also been sick a lot this fall, which has been tough, but I guess we’re both building better immune systems along the way.  By the time all three of you kids make it through elementary school, surely we’ll have been exposed to every cold virus in the Great Plains.

One of your favorite parts of this holiday season as been the Advent calendar (or Alvin calendar, as you call it) that I got you.  It’s your favorite thing to do every morning when you wake up.  A little chocolate treat is the breakfast of champions, I guess.  Your brothers usually do theirs when they get home from school in the afternoon, and we’ve had some learning opportunities about delaying gratification.  You get pretty frustrated when they get their daily treat so long after you had yours that you can’t even remember doing.  One day earlier this week you decided to wait until afternoon to open the little door, and I thought you were really beginning to understand the concept.  That pattern didn’t hold, though.  I think you were just sick and not in the mood to eat anything.

Despite a lingering cough, you are mostly healthy now, and you got to go back to school yesterday.  Your coughs wake me up at night, but you usually sleep through them, so at least you’re getting better-rested again.

We were waiting around on some information about our home remodeling project, and we held off on the getting a Christmas tree until we knew whether we should put it in our main house or our backup house.  It turns out construction won’t begin until mid-January, so yesterday I went out and got a tree.  It’s usually a family project, but it was already getting late enough in the season that the fresh tree selection was getting meager, and our weekends have been busy with other commitments.  The kind folks at Earl May offered free delivery and even came in and helped me get the tree into the stand, so nobody seemed too disappointed to miss the family outing.  You were just so excited to see the tree in the living room when you got home from school, and you wanted to start decorating it immediately.  We even managed our traditional family dance party to Bob Dylan’s “Must Be Santa” once everybody was home in the evening.  Miles didn’t participate, but at least he emerged from his room and stood sullenly in the corner while the rest of us danced by the tree.

Your current favorites:  the book Potty Palooza, a potty-training tract that we read a lot when you were still building that skill, which you’ve rediscovered as a good bedtime story; playing with your little stuffed deer, Eddie; lemonade; the WiiU game Splatoon; playing the game Miles invented called Great Adventure; and delaying bedtime by suggesting that we chat.

You’re getting so curious and interested in your world.  Over the few minutes when I’ve been trying to write this, you asked two good questions:  1. Why are Christmas tree leaves different than other trees’ leaves? and 2. Why don’t Chip and Dale’s feets get cold?  You see, the little creatures in your video were running around in the snow with no shoes or socks.  It’s a reasonable question.  Next you’ll ask me to subitize how many toes they have.  Maybe we’ll come up with the same answer and maybe we won’t, but you’re always a good partner for a chat.

Love,

Mommy

Dear Miles,

Now, in the last month of your eleventh year, your dad and I are bracing ourselves for the pre-teen creeping into our lives.  You’ve come to that stage where you’re too cool to care about anything.  I remember being in that stage myself, so I try to be generous about it, but it’s hard to understand now that I have greater perspective.  The thing is, I know you really do care about a lot of things.  You’re just at a point where you either can’t or won’t communicate with your parents about it.  I realize it’s a normal part of establishing your own identity, but it sure can be irritating.  I took you and Tobin to see City High’s production of A Christmas Carol last weekend.  We knew several people in the cast and crew, and you seemed interested in seeing them perform.  At intermission, I asked if you were enjoying it, and you said you were.  On the drive home, you mentioned that you like going to evening performances over matinees because it seems more grown-up and exciting.  Overall, I thought it was a very good experience.  The next day, during family cocktail hour, I asked you and Tobin what your favorite parts of the play were.  Your answer:  “When it ended.”

I think you were just being glib and thought you sounded cool, but it’s very annoying when I spend time and money on something intended to be a fun and enriching experience and you crap all over it.  I don’t think you really meant to be as surly as you sounded, because upon further prodding you admitted that you liked seeing our friends Gabe and Caleigh on stage.  A very important life lesson I’ve learned is when not to go for the first joke I think of.  The cheap and easy laugh is not usually worth much.

You’re not always acerbic, though.  Almost every day I see you being sweet and kind to Callum.  You two have forged a really special friendship.  I’m already dreading the day you move out, not only because of how much I will miss you, but because of how much Callum will.  I keep trying to (mostly jokingly) pressure you into staying local, which you tell me only guarantees that you’ll move away.  We’ll see.  Of course I’ll be happy if you have great dreams that take you to exciting destinations, but I would be equally happy if you stick around and hang out with me forever.

Photo by Gary Clarke

The usual holiday season onslaught has begun.  We’re still in our regular house, and we don’t know for sure when we’ll have to vacate for construction.  For that reason, we haven’t gotten a Christmas tree yet, because we’re not sure which house we should put it in.  That plus how late Thanksgiving fell this year has me all disorganized and disoriented about the season.  We’re trying to go light on physical presents this year, instead focusing on experiences like theater tickets and activities for our spring break trip.  You guys have so much crap you never use already, and the fact that we’ll probably be hauling stuff between multiple houses makes your dad and me even less inclined to accumulate more items.  You still seem to have some attachment to the Christmas morning rituals, though.  I was telling you about what your friend Daniel’s family is doing, skipping presents entirely and doing a family trip to San Diego instead.  I was really emphasizing how cool that is, but you didn’t seem sold on the idea.  It’s weird, because I have a terrible time extracting wishlist ideas from you.  You’re too old for most toys, and you don’t think clothes are very fun, and you get most of your books from the library or on your Kindle.  I hope you enjoy opening boxes with gift cards inside.

Another thing that comes around this time of year every four-to-eight years is multiple opportunities to meet presidential candidates.  You and your dad went to see Pete Buttigieg last weekend, and I think you had a good time.  We saw Elizabeth Warren together earlier in the fall, and if circumstances allow, we might go see Julián Castro tomorrow.  While you don’t always get a very nuanced view of a candidate at these glad-handing rallies, I still think it’s cool that you’re getting so many opportunities to learn and be part of the process.  Even more, I think it’s cool that you’re interested.  Curiosity and openness to learning are two of the most important factors in becoming an informed citizen, and I’m very proud that you’re displaying those qualities.

Your current favorites:  pasta, Minecraft, YouTube videos on the topic of Minecraft, band and choir, sleeping in, and the Halloween candy you’re still hoarding.  You’re right on track to finish it at the moment the Christmas candy appears.  You have a plan in place to make that last until Valentine’s Day.

Enjoy your last month of being eleven, my guy.  You’re a sweet-and-salty mix right now, and I guess that will probably ebb and flow for the foreseeable future.  This morning you let me hug you for a long time, and I’ll be thinking about that all day.  I’ll definitely need to remind myself of that extended hug the next time you mutter a rude comment under your breath or act like it’s outrageous for your dad or me to tell you to stop screen time.  Transitions are hard on everybody, and it’s my job to keep loving you through them.  It’s also my pleasure.  Sometimes it’s my pleasure from a different room in the house.

Love,

Mom