Dear Tobin,

Another month has gone by, and you’re continuing your usual patterns of being happy, energetic, and funny. I can always count on you for a smile, and while I know it’s been hard on you to be physically separated from your friends, your sunny disposition has mostly prevailed. You do “lunch bunch” social events once a month with your classmates, during which you set up your computer at the lunch table and chat while you eat. I cringe every time you do it, because you’ve been using your dad’s nice laptop rather than your glacial school-issued computer, and I am afraid it’s going to get coated with bread crumbs or sloshed with lemonade. It hasn’t happened yet, but you are awfully wiggly, so we’ll have to make sure to set it a good distance from your food and beverage.

For the time being, you’ve occupied the new downstairs space as your work area. You and your dad have been talking about swapping. He’s currently set up in the guest bedroom, which is a lot tighter quarters. Still, of the two of you, you’re the one who’s more likely to break into a spontaneous dance, so maybe more space suits you. You’ve been doing great in school. Every time your teacher sends an update, you’re always checking all the boxes in terms of participation and completion of work. We have your conference in a couple of weeks, and it will be interesting to see how your teacher describes your experience. We already know her, as she was Miles’s sixth grade teacher last year, and I think she’s well-suited to online teaching. She’s young and competent with technology, and even more important, she’s flexible and laid-back. Those are important qualities in a teacher who’s having to approach school in a whole new way. I hope you mostly use your energy and humor in a way that makes her day better and not more challenging.

Halloween was weird but still fun. You got to see your school friend Ben at an outdoor trunk-or-treat sponsored by volunteers from your dad’s workplace. Your dad and Ben’s dad work for the same organization, so it’s been easy to coordinate some time with him. You and Ben have had some online gaming hangouts, too.

We also organized a candy hunt in the park for neighborhood kids, and even though it got more crowded than I wish it had, the kids were great about wearing masks. It was a beautiful day, with a nice breeze, and everyone had fun. We didn’t do any trick-or-treating, but you still got lots of candy. Your costume, which I made with plenty of guidance for you, was The Prowler. I wasn’t familiar with that character, but you tell me it’s a villain from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I’m pretty sure you and your brothers watched that on the iPad during our interminable drive home from the Florida Keys last spring, but the details are all a blur. In any case, you were happy with your costume and overall had a good time.

I feel like I use the word outrageous a lot when describing the hair of my children, and that adjective is suiting you better all the time. It has gotten to the point where it gets in your face and makes it hard for you to see your computer screen, so you let me put it in a funny ponytail on top of your head. It reminded us of the titular character from Robert Munsch’s Stephanie’s Ponytail. Much like Stephanie, you are a leader and not a follower. I’m sure if you went to school with your silly ponytail, you would shrug off any teasing you might receive and probably start a new trend.

I sent the above photo to Mubby and Skitter, and they both remarked that you looked just like me when I was a kid. I don’t remember if I ever wore a hairstyle like that, but it seems plausible.

In lieu of official school pictures, you and your brothers and I went out to the park and shot some portraits by the rocks at the park. We’ve had some lovely days this fall, so park time (and leaf-raking time) have been a big part of many of your days. You even mowed the lawn once. Today at lunch, you told me that you were feeling frustrated that you’re not saving up for anything in particular right now, because you like pestering your dad and me to assign you chores to earn money. I don’t know what a lawn-mow goes for these days, but if you keep it up next summer, you might get some real bank.

Our lawn is currently a muddy mess. The construction project on our house is pretty much complete, and a landscaping company came and spread out dirt and cast grass seed. It’s been cold and rainy ever since, so I don’t know how well it will take. You may get a series of easy mowing jobs next summer if the yard stays as barren as it is now.

Your current favorites: cinnamon toast, tortilla chips, making lists of your favorite animals in many different categories, YouTube videos, Minecraft, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books (both physical books and audiobooks), taking long showers, jumping out of your chair and dancing during dinner, and making everybody laugh.

You’re a lion’s roar of a person, Tobin, and I admire how well you’ve adapted to our strange new life. With the promising COVID-19 vaccines on the horizon, it’s nice to know there are probably days coming when you can get back to your friends, but I admit I’ve loved having extra time with you. Even though you wear me out with your energy and nonstop chatter, it’s the kind of worn-out that feels satisfying, not draining.

(Sometimes it’s a little draining, but there’s nobody I’d rather have draining me than you.)

Love,

Mom

November 11, 2020:

Callum made a pair of glasses out of glowsticks and was very excited about them.

Dear Callum,

This month has been a time of major growth for you. As I was telling your dad the other day, as much as I hate COVID-19 and the devastation it has caused our state, country, and planet, it has been a real gift to spend this time watching you learn.

I hear a lot of people complaining about online education, how it’s less than ideal in X, Y, or Z way. Due to skyrocketing cases, even the families who chose “hybrid” (in-person part time) are going all-online next week, and boy are some people crabby about it. I acknowledge that it’s not perfect, and you’re not really getting the kindergarten experience that your brothers got. It’s hard for a teacher to forge bonds with kids and even harder for kids to get to know each other, but you are doing great. The curriculum is more creative and varied than anything I could come up with on my own, and I am so grateful to the educators who developed it. You love the SuperKids, a team of characters that are part of your Language Arts program. You thought you were going to move onto your next SuperKid today, but it turns out it’s not until tomorrow, and you were so disappointed. I know you’ll be enthusiastic about tomorrow’s activities.

You are truly learning to read, sounding out words and remembering exception cases like double-o’s and special letter combinations. You light up when you succeed at reading something, and I’m so proud seeing how proud you are of yourself. You’re doing really well in math, too. You use Dreambox, another online program that teaches math concepts in ways I never would have thought of. Yesterday you asked for my help on a particularly tricky exercise—a visual illustration (in a ten-frame) of a two-digit number flashed on the screen briefly, and you had to choose the correct Arabic numeral and then reconstruct the ten-frame. Dreambox is self-paced, and that’s much more challenging than what you’re doing in class. It wasn’t easy for you at first, but once you got the hang of it, you did so well. You even got the concept that it’s more efficient to make the number eight by moving a ten-piece unit and subtracting two rather than building it one-by-one. I’m sure if I read this in a year I’ll have no idea what I was talking about, but the upshot is that online education is working. You’re learning and having fun, and I really enjoy being there to watch it happen.

Getting up in the morning isn’t always easy for you, and your dad is a little sad that you haven’t wanted to do big chair time with him. That’s something both your brothers did as he hauled them out of bed in the morning: he’d guide them to the recliner and cuddle them for a few minutes to help them adjust to the morning. For some reason you haven’t wanted to do that, choosing to sit by yourself on a chair or couch while I make your breakfast. Maybe once you get back to normal school and you have to wake up earlier, you’ll appreciate a little cuddly snooze time with your dad.

It’s certainly not that you don’t enjoy spending time with him. You and your dad play all kinds of games together in the evening. Recently I’ve seen you playing Snap Circuits, Candyland, Mindo (a cool logic puzzle game we got from the Haunted Bookshop), and of course you love to play video games with him. You recently accomplished some important task in Zelda: Breath of the Wild before your dad did, and even though the specifics were meaningless to me, your joy was palpable.

You’re creative and interested in building and inventing things. You’re always fishing around in drawers for supplies like gaffer’s tape, scissors, glue, and cardboard. Today you wanted to make a doghouse, which I’m trying to avoid because we don’t have a dog. You wanted to make it with wood and screws and nails, and I don’t know if we have any extra wood lying around, and also we don’t have a dog. I may have placated you with the idea of making it out of cardboard, which I believe we do have. Maybe we could make a small one that a stuffed animal could use. You haven’t brought it up this afternoon, but something tells me you haven’t given up on the idea.

Maybe you’ll be the only one of my kids interested in making a diorama. I can’t believe nobody ever wants to do that.

Halloween was unusual but still fun. We skipped traditional trick-or-treating and instead did some outdoor, social-distanced candy-acquisition activities. Your dad’s workplace sponsored a trunk-or-treat, and we did a candy hunt in the park behind our house. Lots of neighborhood kids showed up, and I was really impressed with how well those little people kept their masks on. You guys just seem to get it. You also got lots of treats, including your favorite snack, Pirate’s Booty. You have two bags that you stashed on the barstool I use during my morning coffee and news scan, and I hope you eat them soon, because one of these times I’m going to forget to move them and turn them into Squashed-By-Mom’s-Booty.

Your current favorites: ZacScottGames on YouTube, board games with your dad, the book Potty Palooza at bedtime (you’ve been potty-trained for years now, but you still love the book), waffles, cinnamon toast, your collection of little stuffed animals, orange juice with a splash of maraschino cherry juice, and dancing to the song “It’s Raining Tacos.”

You’re a joy, little Callum, and even though I’m pretty tired of Potty Palooza, I will never get tired of you. I’m looking forward to watching your skills continue to grow, and I’m so happy I get to be your mom.

Love,

Mommy

Dear Miles,

The last month featured a very unusual Halloween, lots of yard work and other outside time, a major national and world event, and some more kitchen adventures.

We had an eerily warm few weeks. I wonder if I searched “eerily warm” on this site how many hits I’d get. Anyway, the end of October and beginning of November were objectively beautiful if contextually disconcerting, and you and your brothers spent tons of time outside. Your dad had you doing lots of leaf-raking, which I figured would make you very grumpy. It actually only made you sort of grumpy, and a lot of the time, you and Tobin got along very well. You brainstormed some new video game idea, and you spent a lot of time trying to put it into practice, too. I’m not sure whether you’re still in the storyboarding stage or you actually know anything about programming games, but either way, it was heartwarming to see you and Tobin working together on a project.

You and I busted our buns making your Halloween costume. It came out pretty spectacular: “The Beholder,” a character from Dungeons & Dragons. You weren’t too concerned that no one was going to know what you were, but it was still a thrill when one of your dad’s coworkers immediately identified it at an outdoor trunk-or-treat event. The bad news was that you got carsick and threw up on the pavement shortly after getting out of the car, so that particular activity wasn’t all that fun. Fortunately, your distress was short-lived, and you recovered quickly enough that you could enjoy the candy hunt in the park the next day. While it was mostly smaller kids, a few of your friends showed up, and everybody had a masked and mostly socially-distanced good time. Your friends thought your costume was impressive.

I know you’re almost too old for Halloween costumes, at least ones made by your mom, but for the time being, I still really enjoy making them with you. It’s fun to hear your ideas and go back and forth on how to implement them, and I love seeing your eyes light up when I show you a completed stage. In this case, there were a lot of eyes.

We made the costume out of things we found around the house (cardboard for the basic structure, old sheets and pillowcases dyed with leftovers from a summer tie-dye project, homemade play-doh for the teeth) supplemented with a few extras from Amazon and JoAnn curbside pickup. It turned out great, and while I can’t think of any other occasions that will require a giant pinkish-purple eyeball thing with little eyeballs on stalks, there’s no way I’m throwing it out any time soon. It’s currently haunting me every time I go through the new mudroom.

The mudroom is now fully functional, because the landing/grilling deck and stairs to the backyard are complete. We also got to enjoy our balcony last weekend, because while it isn’t one hundred percent done, it’s close enough that we had family cocktail hour there and toasted the election results.

You closely followed the election and the excruciatingly slow returns process. We knew it was going to be that way; with the record-breakingly large number of mail-in and absentee votes, it was no surprise that it took a long time to get any answers. I peeked into your room a few times and saw maps on your laptop screen as you monitored the situation. I’m proud that you’re engaged in current events, and I think you’ve learned a lot about the electoral college, swing states, voter suppression, and other valuable topics.

You’re becoming more competent every day. I’m proud of the new food preparation techniques you’ve tried through your Family and Consumer Sciences class. The Energy Balls you made were such a hit that you’re considering making additional batches. The smoothies weren’t quite so popular. We’re just not a yogurt family (except for frozen yogurt with lots of M&Ms on top). You have salsa on the docket for tomorrow, and I’m planning dinner around it, so I hope it’s good.

From leaf-raking to cooking to current events, you’re learning so much right now. I still wish you’d let me hug you more, but you’re also learning about who you are as an individual, and if that means some physical separation as you sort yourself out, I can deal with it. I think you know that I love you undyingly, and you can take the risk of sometimes being a turd to me without gambling on my affection.

Love,

Mom