Dear Callum,

You are now six years old, and you are very excited about it. As is our family tradition, I decorated the dining room with balloons and a sparkly number six to honor your birthday. I make them out of glittery pipe cleaners, and I ended up with an extra one after making yours. You found it, and you used it to shape your own personal sparkly six. One of your birthday gifts was a replacement for your favorite glow-in-the-dark skeleton pajamas, which were getting much too small and much too holey for you to keep wearing. I showed you that they’re a size six, the same as your age, and you found that very impressive. You’ve reminded me several times at bedtime that your pajamas are only for six-year-olds because that’s what size they are. I hope you don’t look too carefully at the tags on your other clothes.

We were able to celebrate your birthday with our bubble buddies Mubby and Skitter, which is good because with you and Miles having birthdays on consecutive days, we had lots of cake to share. You requested chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, decorated with blueberries formed into a 6. You also requested strawberries, which you added to the cake yourself. I had a vision in my head of how the cake would look, and your berry placement preferences didn’t exactly match mine, but it was your birthday so you won.

Your biggest hobby right now is crafting inventions. Aunt Suzy and Uncle Joe sent you a kit with a saw and screws you can use on cardboard, and you built a robot friend out of those. Luckily, with all the online shopping we’ve been doing lately, we have plenty of boxes around for you to repurpose. Sometimes your ideas for inventions outpace the capabilities of you and your assistants, but it’s mostly fun and not too frustrating. You also have been using a lot of gaffer’s tape. You made yourself a pair of gaffer’s tape shoes. They reminded me of how Skitter used to use duct tape to extend the life of his slippers, only you skipped the slippers.

During your winter break from school, you played a lot of Switch, built forts and other geometric structures with a construction set you got for Christmas, read a lot of stories, and didn’t take many baths. We’re finally past your allergy season, so I no longer have to give you a full bath every night. You also have very dry skin, so even without a bath, nightly lotion application is essential. You’re not old enough to be very stinky yet, and your bathroom habits are tidy enough that nothing gets too gross in that department, so I guess we’re in the minimal-bathing sweet spot. Your hair is very unruly, and even though you’re pretty patient with letting me trim it, I’m not sure I’d feel confident sending you to school with your current levels of tidiness. I am counting on the fact that the camera on your Chromebook has low enough resolution that no one can see you clearly enough to judge you.

Except for the obvious social development deficit, school is going really well. You seem to be settling in to your new class. I think that switch was harder on me than on you, since you didn’t seem to form much of a bond with most of your classmates anyway. It’s hard when the kids are just little squares on the screen and are on mute most of the time. You still have your old friend Griffin in your class, as well as your favorite teaching assistant Ms. Dee, so that helped smooth things. Academically, you’re doing very well, learning lots of new reading skills and advancing in math. One great thing about online school is that I can bookmark your favorite activities so you can keep doing them. Your librarian has been offering some really fun coding games, and you spent a lot of your leisure time this afternoon writing little algorithms to make a monster progress through various candy-eating tasks. I am really enjoying the privilege of doing these with you. They’re fun, and I can see how they’re priming you for more complicated tasks down the road.

Another of your favorites is science, because the district has put together some really interesting experiments. We just finished a unit on wood, and you got to make your own particle board and plywood. We’re starting a paper unit now, and you were pretty psyched to see that the dropper will be involved. Dropping water on your wood samples was interesting, and dropping water on paper might be even better.

Your current favorites: pizza, “waffles how I always like it and orange juice how I always like it, extra with no ice,” steak, playing Zelda with your dad, Terry’s chocolate oranges, the What Should Danny Do book series, Wild Kratts and the animal facts you learn by watching it, bedtime stories, and doing modern dance moves as you leave the dinner table. Toward the end of dinner every night, you ask, “May I be excused for…” and what you really want to say is “screen time,” but usually we don’t want you to at that moment. Instead you say, “May I be excused for…nothing?” I don’t know why you’d rather do nothing than hang out with us, but when I eventually say yes, you wave your arms and sway as you leave the room.

You’re good at creating your own fun, whether it’s cardboard robots, model mammoths, or tape shoes. Maybe when you want to leave the table, it’s because you’re creating your own fun in your head, and you need some peace and quiet to do it. Being six is a big deal, and I can understand why you need space to relish it. You’ve learned and grown so much this year. I don’t love the circumstances that led to it, I find it very heartwarming and satisfying to be by your side as you do it.

You’re funny, smart, curious, tender, shy, and still my little sweetheart. I often ask you if you’ll always cuddle me, even when you’re a grumpy teenager. You swear that you will. I won’t hold you to it if your need for space includes space from me, because I know it’s a normal part of development, in but in the meantime, let’s keep hanging out. Every weirdly-placed strawberry, water droplet on wood, and untidy hair is a memory of my wonderful six-year-old. You’re the best.

Love,

Mommy