Dear Tobin,

It has been a heck of a month.  The biggest deal is that we sort of moved.  Our house addition/renovation project starts today, so over the weekend, we moved into our friends’ house.  They’re out of the country, so we’re house-sitting for them while big changes happen at our home.  You’ve been a great helper through the process, always ready to pitch in and provide your trademark enthusiasm.  Last night you helped your dad get the TV set up, and you got a seating area arranged and organized a family viewing of one of the YouTube shows you and your dad like to watch together.  It was surprisingly educational and engaging, about Hong Kong’s housing market and the unusual political and economic situation there that forces people to live in parking-space-sized “cage homes” for exorbitant prices.

Except for in the morning when you have to wake up sooner than you wish, you’re a person who likes action and activity, and I think having a project and goal like that was good for your psyche.  It made you feel like you were helping our family’s efforts in our new space (much nicer than a cage home) and establishing some new traditions.

Our “new” house is near Hickory Hill Park, so even though you won’t have as easy of access to our backyard park this spring and summer, you’ll still have lots of good opportunities for outdoor exploration.  You’ll also continue taekwondo and basketball for a while, and then you’ll play baseball this summer.  You’ve expressed interest in the Filmscene animation camp that Miles does, which fortunately is separated by age group, so you won’t attend the same session.  I say “fortunately” because you two can get a bit competitive, and I could see some squabbles if you were forced to work together in a creative environment.  Another possibility is the sports camp you went to last summer with your friend Ben.  Ben won’t be available to do it with you this year, because he’s the one who’s out of the country and letting us use his house.  Another friend expressed interest in doing it with you, though, so maybe that’s how it will work out.

In line with your interest in earning money, a new thing you tried recently was your first paying job (besides the couple of bucks you scam off your dad and me now and then for doing unnecessary and unrequested chores).  You were the subject of a research experiment in the Psychology department at the University.  At first you were disappointed because we thought it was going to be a virtual reality study like Miles did a while ago, and it turned out not to be.  Once you got there, though, you really dug in and enjoyed it.  The researcher asked you to look at a series of pictures and rate how safe the kid in the pictures was being as he performed different tasks.  Then I rated the same pictures, and after that, we looked at them together and discussed how safe or unsafe the activity was.  I think the point was to see whether kids are more or less inclined to risk-taking when they’re away from their parents.  Of course, you never know for sure in these situations if they’re actually studying what they tell you they’re studying, but in any case, you felt very important.  You got a $15 gift card for your effort.  You immediately wanted to go and spend it, but you decided just to buy some chips and gum for the time being and save up more earnings for a larger purchase down the road.

We had a fun trip to the theater earlier in the month.  As per our usual tradition, I bought theater tickets for you, Miles, and me for Christmas, and the time came to use them.  We saw A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder at Theatre Cedar Rapids.  I wasn’t sure if you’d love it—that sort of thing is really more Miles’s bag than yours—but you had a great time.  It was funny and high-action and featured some very talented performers.  We had a terrible time finding parking, since unbeknownst to me the performance we attended coincided with a big concert in the same area.  We slid into our seats just in time to catch our breaths before the lights went down, and we all enjoyed it a lot.  I suppose I should start including Callum in these outings, but it’s hard to find a show that would appeal to such a wide age range.

When we moved into the loaner house, you were excited to have your own room.  At home, all three of you sleep in the same room (by choice–Miles has his own room but chooses to join you and Callum when bedtime arrives.  I don’t think you made it even half an hour by yourself the first night before you decided you wanted to come in and share Callum’s single bed with him.  Yesterday, I moved the other single mattress into Miles and Callum’s room, but the only way it fit was at the foot of Miles’s bed.  You seemed okay with that, but you asked me if it was okay if you moved back into Callum’s bed after I was done getting him to bed.  I said that was all right, but by the time Callum was asleep, you had fallen asleep too.  You had arranged yourself so that your body was on your own bed, but your head was overlapping onto Callum’s mattress.  I asked your dad if you were still in that position when he woke you up for school this morning, and he said you were.  I’m glad you feel safe and secure with your brothers, and it doesn’t bother me a bit if you guys want to stay together.  Despite your daytime squabbles, you always come together when it’s time to be cozy.

Your current favorites:  pizza, basketball (especially the hoop outside our loaner house), video games, the Cam Jansen book series, blowing bubbles with gum, talking about our vacation plans, and making noise every single second you’re awake.

You’re hilarious, exhausting, smart, and energetic.  You’re eight-and-a-half now, which is pretty crazy, but I know we’re going to have a wonderful spring and summer to enjoy the second half of your eighth year.  A month from now, this post will be full of pictures from our Florida Keys trip (hopefully—I did buy trip insurance this time in case coronavirus shuts down the airport or something).  You’re my great adventure buddy, and I’m so excited to do more exciting things with you.

Love,

Mom

I need to blog this recipe, because I make it fairly often, and I always have to refer to the website.  I noticed it’s from 2012, and who knows how long anything will last on the internet?

Lasagne, adapted from The Amateur Gourmet

(Can be doubled; this is enough for the members of my family to will try things to eat it and have leftovers.)

1 pound Italian sausage

24 ounces homemade tomato sauce (1 of the smaller freezer containers)

9 lasagne noodles (about half of a 1-pound package)

half of a 15-ounce container of ricotta cheese

1/2 cup shredded Parmesan cheese, plus extra for sprinkling

1 egg

8 ounces (1 ball) fresh mozzarella, thinly sliced

A couple of tablespoons each fresh basil and parsley, minced

Salt and pepper

1. Preheat oven to 400F.
2.  Cook the sausage in a large pan.  When it’s browned, add the tomato sauce and let it simmer while you do step 2.
3.  Cover the lasagne noodles in the hottest tapwater you can get.  Let them sit for 20 minutes.  Poke them down as well as you can, but don’t worry if one end sticks out a little bit.
4.  Combine ricotta, Parmesan, egg, salt, pepper, and herbs in a small bowl.
5. Spray a square (8- or 9-inch) baking dish with nonstick spray.
6. Ladle a scoop or two of sauce onto the bottom of the dish, just to cover.
7. Trim the top couple-three inches off the lasagne noodles (the less-soaked ends) to fit the pan.  Place three noodles across the bottom of the pan.
8. Spread about 1/3 of the ricotta mixture over the noodles.
9. Arrange about 1/3 of the mozzarella slices over the ricotta mixture.
10. Repeat—sauce, noodles, ricotta, mozzarella until you have three layers of each.  Pour any remaining sauce over the top and sprinkle with reserved Parmesan.

If you bake this right away, it will only take 30-40 minutes.  If you make it ahead and refrigerate, give it closer to an hour+.  You can cover it with foil for most of the cooking, removing the foil for the last 15-20 minutes to crisp things up a little.

Dear Callum,

You were an eating machine yesterday.  This is the first time I remember noticing a major uptick in your appetite, so you must be on a big growth and development spurt.  Last night for bedtime snack you ate Chex Mix and two scoops of peanut butter, even after eating breakfast, lunch, snack at school, after-school snack at home, and dinner.  You’re normally not an eater of big quantities, so your behavior yesterday stood out.  You’ve also had some leg pains lately, which Dr. Google and my previous experience with your brothers tells me are probably just growing pains.  I remember having them as a kid, too.

One of the best parts about having a third child is how much less worried I am about doing things right by someone else’s definition and how much more willing I am to flex to the situation at hand.  The other night you woke up around 4:30 a.m. and came into our room complaining of a leg pain.  I know the “correct” response would have been to comfort and medicate you as appropriate and put you back in your own bed, for fear of creating bad habits.  Now I think about Miles, who barely even lets me hug him anymore (I consider it a win when he doesn’t wiggle too hard in an attempt to break free), and I scoop you right up into bed with your dad and me.  You aren’t going to need my cuddles forever, sweet pup, and I want to take advantage of these times when sleeping next to me solves all your problems. By morning, your leg was fine.

You sleep with a whole menagerie of stuffed animals, though you’re not particularly attached to any one.  You just like a lot of company for sleeping.  On any given night, your probably have at least six of your collection with you:  Curious George, Eddie the deer, Teddy the bear, Teddy the dog, Pengwee the owl, Penguin the penguin, Sharky the shark, your Nemo blanket, and Stuffle the panda.  The night when you came to our bed, you brought Pengwee and a travel neck pillow.  You’re not picky; you just like representatives of your gang with you.  We have a lot of conversations with them at bedtime and in the morning when I come check on you.  A lot of times one of them is feeling sad and needs some love, which we take turns providing.  Sometimes they have owies that require kissing.

We have a trip coming up, and I asked you which one you want to take with us.  You thought about it and said, “Not Stuffle, because I wouldn’t want him to get lost.”  I pointed out that the last time we went on vacation, you brought Curious George, and he didn’t get lost.  My goal in that interaction was to assure you that we’d be careful not to lose your special toy.  You replied, “We should take Curious George, then.”  I guess you interpreted what I said to mean that Curious George has special not-getting-lost qualities.  Maybe we need to get him chipped so I can keep that promise.

Winter has been a bit of a drag, though honestly it hasn’t been a terrible one.  We’ve had a few days when the temperature went below zero, but mostly it’s been pretty mild.  We had one good snow for sculpting, and you and your brothers spent a long time outside playing in it.  Otherwise it’s just been that grey, dirty kind of weather with ice-encrusted dirty snow on the ground that so often comes with February.  You don’t seem to hate it too much, though.  Almost every day after school I have to drag you to the car, because you would like to pick up big chunks of ice and snow and smash them on the ground.  Actually, in your ideal world you’d bring the ice chunk into the car to bring home, but I nix that every time.  I know I started this letter on a note of indulgence, but a person has to draw a line somewhere.  No ice chunks bigger than your head in the car.  Sorry.

Your current favorites:  playing with Play-doh, especially the pizza-making kit Mubby gave you for your birthday; working on your class Valentines; other hands-on projects, like the dinosaur fossil-excavation kit you rescued from our Goodwill pile; strawberry ice cream; sophisticated cheeses (you are fond of parmigiano reggiano and aged manchego), and playing with both your brothers.  You especially enjoy having rough-and-tumble time with Tobin and cozy time Miles.  You’re very lucky to have two brothers, so there’s always someone ready for you whether you’re looking for a dance party or a cuddly story on the couch.  You’re so sweet and fun these days, my swiftly-growing little pup.  I love hearing about what you did in school and all your curious questions.  We’ve watched a video about how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly about a hundred times (it turns out I did not have a clear understanding about how the chrysalis forms), and it’s so cool to watch you learn and absorb what the world has to offer.

Keep up the good growth, my sweetheart, and always know that you have a place next to me.

Love,

Mommy

Dear Miles,

Despite your history as a generally surly person, you’ve seemed really happy lately.  You certainly still have your moods, but you’ve given me reason to be optimistic that your junior high years might not lead to the worsening of personality that so many people experience.  Of course, I don’t want to jinx myself by saying that too much, so for the time being I’ll just enjoy it.

Over the last few months you’ve become closer friends with kids you’ve known in school for years but with whom you’d never socialized much.  In some ways it’s a bummer that it took you so long to get to know them, because next year you’ll be inundated with new faces and chances to form new friendships.  On the other hand, I could see that being overwhelming for a person like you, so maybe having a larger core friend group will increase your odds of having an anchor friend or two in your new school environment.

The latest thing you’re excited about is the GSI, or Glue Stick Investigation.  That’s a club you created based on a very dubious claim of glue stick theft in your classroom.  Apparently a bunch of rival and allied groups with similar acronym names have cropped up, and you’re always telling me (through laughter) about the latest membership changes.  You even used a gift card Mubby gave you for your birthday to make a GSI t-shirt. Your teacher is a closer adherent (no glue pun intended) to the school district’s anti-junk-food policy, so no treats are allowed in your class Valentine’s Day celebration.  I found a good deal on glue sticks on Amazon, so instead of a chocolate heart, you’re enclosing a glue stick in each of your friends’ cards.

You would still spend most of your time watching and creating (mostly watching) YouTube videos if we gave you no screen time limits.  Your Mister Whacky persona remains an important part of your identity, and you even managed to get a bunch of kids hanging out at in the caucus childcare room to watch your videos.

We finally got some good packing snow, which you used to build a rather extensive snow fort.  The picture below is from only about halfway through the construction process.  We’ve had some temperature fluctuations since then, with some melting and re-freezing, which has turned your snow fort into a creepy snow-ghost convention.  Still, you had fun building it  You missed a few days of school due to snow and ice, so it was good to get you out of the house and doing something active during that time.  You’ve decided against playing baseball this summer, though you are going to do Let Me Run.  Your natural state is to be in a comfy chair with a computer in front of you, a position I can’t criticize too harshly since I enjoy it too.  Still, it’s good to find ways to get you to move around a little bit now and then.

I got you a sleeping bag in preparation for your birthday sleepover last month, and you’ve been using it as a general-purpose blanket ever since.  Fortunately (and I didn’t know this when I bought it), it has the option to unzip at the bottom, so it can be more of a sleep tube.  That’s useful for safety when you want to walk around the house with it on.  You sometimes let Callum get in with you.

You’ve been an especially good big brother to Callum lately.  You two have been playing a lot of Mario Maker on the WiiU, playing the adventure games you make up, and reading together.  The other day I overheard you reading a book to Callum even though neither your dad nor I asked you to—you were just having some nice hang-out time with your little brother.  I really appreciate that.  Your dad is going away for a few days early next month, and one reason I know we’ll do fine is because I have you for a helper.

Your current favorites:  Halloween treats, which you’re still hoarding; linguine with homemade tomato sauce; YouTube; the Simpsons; your insult Uno cards; and sleeping in late.  You are also into showers, one of which flooded the bathroom because you didn’t tuck the shower curtain into the tub.  We thought it might have caused thousands of dollars in damage, but I think the  industrial-strength fan your dad rented and left on for a whole weekend got it handled.

That whole debacle was an anomaly, though.  You mostly bring good things into our lives, and I’m so glad we have you.  You’re a little wacky, Mister Whacky, but you’re worth it.

Love,

Mom