I made this tonight. It was good. Lightly adapted from Cafe Delites.

Oven-fried Chicken

5-6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
S&P
1/2 cup AP flour
1 egg, beaten
2 Tbsp milk
1 3/4 cup panko breadcrumbs
1/3 cup vegetable oil
Garlic powder, smoked paprika, cayenne pepper, chipotle powder, to taste

Preheat oven to 400 (convection setting if you have it).

Dry chicken; season lightly with S&P. Combine flour, a dash of salt and pepper, and dried seasonings. In a separate bowl, combine panko breadcrumbs, salt and pepper, and more dried seasonings.  Mix oil into breadcrumb mixture. In a third bowl, combine egg and milk.

Spray a baking rack with nonstick spray and put over a baking sheet.

Dredge chicken in flour, then egg, then breadcrumbs. Press breadcrumbs into chicken to adhere. Put on baking rack and cook for 30-40 minutes, or until chicken reaches 165F and the coating is crispy.

Serve with honey mustard (equal parts dijon mustard and honey) or other dipping sauce of your choice.

Dear Tobin,

As I look through the pictures from this month, I can see that it has definitely been a transitional time, weather-wise. While you still prefer to live life without pants, it’s no longer practical, and you have begrudgingly moved to sweatpants. Earlier this month, we were still enjoying lots of outside time, watching the leaves change colors and even busting out the shorts now and then. Now, we’ve had a couple of snowfalls, one of which was big enough for you and Callum to put on snow gear and play outside. I imagine November will bring more of the same.

Fortunately, the forecast for Halloween is looking pretty good—not shorts-good, but good enough that we won’t have to hide your costume under layers of coats and mittens. You’ve chosen to be the Prowler, a character from the Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse series. It’s a pretty simple design, just dark purple pants and shirt with a lighter purple cape and mask. We still have some finishing touches to put on it, but our first Halloween-related event isn’t for a few days, so I think we’ll get it done.

Halloween will be a bit different this year. I’m not sure how many families will be trick-or-treating, and I definitely don’t want you and your brothers going up and ringing doorbells. Instead, we’re going to an event hosted by your dad’s workplace (an outdoor trunk-or-treat) the day before Halloween, and I’m planning to host a neighborhood candy hunt in our park on Halloween afternoon. Then, if we feel like wandering the streets a bit to see who’s sitting outside offering treats from the ends of their driveways, we can, but we can also keep it brief without having to skip all the Halloween fun. As long as the decent weather forecast holds, we’ll still have a good time.

School has been going well for you. I get a report from your teacher, and it seems like you’re participating well and learning. Your dad set up you up in our new downstairs home office, and you feel like a big shot with two monitors and a whole desk to yourself.  The school district generously and necessarily provided a Chromebook for every student, but yours is pretty old and slow, so this setup works better for you. You’ve been remarkably self-sufficient, only occasionally needing help with a science lab or a math problem. I’m really proud of how we’ll you’ve adjusted. You’ve had some outdoor playdates with one of your good friends, and you’ve had some online playdates with another friend. You’ve fallen under the spell of the ubiquitous game called Among Us, and that’s what you and your friend play online together. Miles got into it first, and of course you watched over his shoulder and became a skilled player yourself. To hear you two describe it, it’s a lot like the Werewolf game Miles has been obsessed with forever. I’m not sure why Among Us caught on the way it did, but everyone seems to be playing it. Even politicians are hosting online games as campaign fundraisers.

We’ve really been enjoying our new space, not only the downstairs office area for you but also the enlarged and improved kitchen and dining room. Our family cocktail hours have never been better lit. We’re still waiting on the outside to get finished. The last we heard, it was supposed to be done in a week, though I don’t see how that could be possible given the amount left to do. In any case, it will be a big relief to have the whole project finished so we can make use of all the space.

Your hair is getting enormous, and you have decided haircuts are not in your future. In a way it’s good you won’t be walking to school in cold weather this year, because I’d probably have to search hard to find a hat that would fit over your poofy hair. It’s getting impressive. Objectively, I think you look better with shorter hair, but you do not agree. I’m going to take some home-shot school pictures of you, because it would be strange to have a blank in our school photo collection for this year, and part of the school picture ritual is looking back and photos from years past. Maybe you’ll see your tidier-haired past self and be moved to recreate it. Also, maybe not. Really, it’s okay. Your wild hair has been a part of you since you moved past the bald-baby stage, and it certainly matches your personality.

Your current favorites: pepperoni pizza (a perpetual favorite that will probably be on this list for the rest of your life); laughing; the Diary of a Wimpy Kid book series; playing and watching videos on the iPad; helping with any kind of project, especially if it has the potential to bring you financial gain; and generally being a nut.

You keep things lively, my dear Tobin. Every night as I kiss you goodnight, you said, “Do you promise not to leave me?” I always say yes, and then I ask you the same. I won’t hold you to that promise, since I know it’s normal and healthy for kids to grow up and find independence, but I would also be perfectly fine with having your silly self around as long as you want to be.

Love,

Mom

Dear Callum,

You are in a very creative and inventive stage. Sometimes it can be exhausting—I spend most of my day managing your online school activities, and then in your downtime you often want to do a craft project or other activity. Other times you’re okay with playing Switch, so depending on what else I need to accomplish during the day, either option may occur. This afternoon, for example, you held me to my promise that we could rake leaves into a pile. You had a lot of fun jumping into them with Tobin, but when you were all done, you weren’t so crazy about the idea of me raking them to the curb for the suck truck.

I was able to convince you to move some of the leaves to the garden. You helped me plant garlic on Saturday, and we hadn’t yet put leaves on the garlic bed to mulch them. We got that done today, and you were very sweet and tender about tucking the baby garlic cloves in under the leaf blanket so they could be cozy for winter. You’re a snuggly and cozy guy, so it made sense to you that the garlic needed the same kind of care.

You get so attached to things. I don’t know where you got the impression that you live in a world of shortage, because we are very fortunate, and I can’t think of a time when you didn’t have enough of anything. A family joke is that you are emotionally attached to food leftovers, though you never actually eat them. Heaven forbid I try to throw away the half-bowl of pasta you didn’t finish, because you’re quite sure you will eat it for lunch the next day. Then the next day comes, and toast sounds a lot better to you than pasta (which is presumably why you didn’t finish it the night before). Then the pasta sits in the fridge and I forget about it for weeks until it’s totally unusable.

Another craft project you recently made was based on a school activity. The first letter in your Language Arts curriculum was C, which naturally is one you already know well.  The unit had all kinds of C connections, including a kid named Cass who likes to cook concoctions.  One of her concoctions was the Crunchy Castle, and you had a lot of fun making it based on the instructions in your book. We sent a picture of you with your crunchy castle to your teacher, Ms. Kurtz, and your favorite teaching assistant, Ms. Dee.  They both got a kick out of it. I hope things like that help them get to know you a little better. Of course Ms. Dee already knows and loves you, but the online format can be challenging in the area of forging personal connections.

Halloween is coming up, and while we don’t know for sure how we’re going to handle the festivities, you and your brothers are firmly on board with costumes. I decided to get your costume early, since you were excited about it, and it seemed like there was no good reason not to enjoy the safe elements of Halloween as much as we can. If the weather is good on the actual day, we’re thinking about having a candy hunt in the park behind our house, and inviting neighborhood families to participate and contribute candy. Since Halloween is on a Saturday, we could spread things out and not have too many kids together at once. That all depends on a lot of factors, including the cooperation of the neighborhood families and decent weather, but it could be a safer way to have some fun.

In the overlapping Venn diagram of your interest in crafts and Halloween, we made some ghost garland that we’ve hung in different parts of the house. We might have to make some more to put in the park on the day of the celebration. I hope it doesn’t rain, because I think the glue we used to form the ghost shapes is water-soluble, and that could make for some pretty droopy spooks. You chose a pre-fab costume, which is convenient since your brothers chose costumes that are going to take a lot of work. I bet you’ll want to get in on the crafting process of their costumes, though.

You also celebrated a very big milestone last weekend: you learned to ride a big-kid bike. Your dad was sure you were ready, because you’d been gliding around on your Strider bike with confidence for months. We had plans to spend time with Nana and Papa at a state park on a beautiful fall day, so your dad loaded the smallest of our pedal-equipped two-wheelers and your helmet. You tend to be nervous about trying new things, and it took some convincing (and brownies, as evidenced by your face in the picture below), but once you worked up the courage to try, you caught on almost immediately. You didn’t take any spills, and you never wanted to stop. You even insisted on riding on the sidewalk once we got home, despite it being dark. Your dad was a good sport about it, and he agreed that it was useful for you to have some good confidence-building successes under your belt.

Your current favorites: riding your bike, making your breakfast order (“Waffles how I always like it and orange juice how I always like it but lemonade“), crafting, Untitled Goose Game on the Switch, Wild Kratts, the bedtimes stories What Should Danny Do? and Mice and Beans, playing with your brothers, and making tall block towers. Consistent with your reluctance to dismantle leaf piles and throw away leftovers, you got quite upset when your dad took down a tower so he could play blocks with you. The audacity, I know.

Your personality is emerging more every day, my little sweetheart. You are funny and smart and learning so much. Even though doing online school with you is a lot of work, it’s also a special privilege that I get to witness your academic growth directly. Thanks for still thinking it’s cool to hang out with me.

Love,

Mommy

Dear Miles,

I feel like all my pictures of you lately are blurry or awkward, because you don’t spend much time lately gazing adorably at a camera for me. It’s a good thing I took tons of pictures of you during your baby years, because now all you do is making a weird face or run away when I try to take a photo.

You’re not entirely antisocial, though. I’ve noticed you finding opportunities to come talk to me, often about things in which I have to feign interest.  There’s a theory propagated by some YouTube you like that all the Pixar movies take place in the same universe, which is similar to but not the same as our own.  Apparently it all started in The Good Dinosaur when a comet nearly hit the Earth but didn’t quite.  You love to discuss it, and about all I can contribute to that conversation is that I enjoyed Coco. Still, I like the fact that you want to chat.

I try to cherish those moments, because most of the time you prefer to be holed up in your room, reading or playing an online game with your friends or watching YouTubers talk about Pixar theories. I mostly leave you alone when you’re in there, partly because I think you deserve privacy, and also because I’m so busy keeping your brothers on track with their online school and doing my own work.

I thought you were sailing along just fine without much intervention from your dad or me, but then it turned out you had missed some important skills and not correctly submitted some homework assignments in your classes.  I don’t envy your position. The kind of time management and organization required to keep up with all-online school is something I didn’t have to learn until college, and then it was only four or five classes at a time.  You have a full schedule of eight classes, and not all the teachers post assignments and deadlines the same way. Some of them do it in a such a way that it populates the calendar view on the learning management system the school uses, but others post it elsewhere on their websites, and it can be really hard to keep track. I spent forty minutes the other night just sorting out what you have due Sunday night.

I hope you’re able to find some organizational strategies that work for you, because I would hate for you to not do well in school because you haven’t developed a skillset unrelated to the actual coursework. As someone who worked in instructional technology, I’m quick to recognize when teachers are making choices that add a lot of unnecessary obfuscation to the task. That’s frustrating, but it’s also frustrating to see you not take much initiative. You always tell me you have all your work done when you don’t, and you tell me you understand concepts when you don’t. Your dad and I clearly need to probe deeper, and that might mean Tobin and Callum will have to be on their own more than they have been.  It’s a balance we need to find, and we’re working on it. We’ll keep at it together.

As much as you would prefer to be a hermit in your room your whole life, we’ve coerced you into the outdoors as much as we can. We don’t have a lot of this beautiful fall weather left, so we need to enjoy it. We spend the afternoon yesterday at a state park with Nana and Papa, and it was good to see them. It’s going to be hard when the weather turns cold and we can’t have outdoor get-togethers with people anymore. That’s been our only means of socializing, and it doesn’t look like COVID cases will be dropping in our area any time soon.  It doesn’t seem to bother you much, since your preferred method of socializing is texting and video chatting anyway, but I still like hauling you out of your room now and then.

We’ve taken a few nice walks together lately, and I can sometimes steal a blurry picture of you before you hide your head in your hands.

Your current favorites: pasta with homemade tomato sauce, Honey Nut Cheerios, the Artemis Fowl books and the spinoff, the Fowl Twins (but not the movie, you are quick to point out), the online game Among Us, your science class, your Family and Consumer Sciences class, making troll levels in Mario Maker, and performing basic hygiene only when I prod you about it.

For the moment, you are not planning to trick or treat. Probably none of us will; we’re planning a neighborhood candy hunt in the park. You still have an idea for a costume, and I am still super-psyched to help you make it. I’m glad you still take joy in creativity and weirdness, and I hope you know  I’m here to support you in the fun stuff and the boring stuff (I’m looking at you, pre-algebra).

Love,

Mom