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