My sweet Tobin,

You are ten—TEN—a full decade. You’re such a joy to me and everyone else who knows you, I can hardly imagine how many smiles you’ve brought to the world in your ten years. A friend wrote in a birthday greeting that joy follows you like a shadow. That’s apt. Sometimes I look at old videos of you, and your baby laugh is just the same as your current laugh: deep-seated and bursting.

I’ve only seen you a little bit bummed out lately. You started online school while many of your friends went back in person, and even though you understand that it’s for your own health and safety, you’re a little disappointed. I know it’s hard on you, and I am counting down the days until you can be vaccinated. Miles, who is fully-vaccinated, is going to school in-person. Fortunately you have the breadth of understanding to grasp why that’s a reasonable choice and haven’t expressed any jealousy or hostility to him, but I can understand why you’d feel short-shrifted. I’m still nervous about him bringing home a breakthrough infection to you, which is yet another reason I will be first in line, with your hand and Callum’s held in mine, when emergency approval for the vaccine comes through for your age group. We don’t know when that will be, so all I can do is hope that the FDA is swift in their analysis of Pfizer’s data.

As I re-read the last paragraph, I realize that I should amend it to say that you’re only bummed out by Tobin standards. After a brief period of crabbiness this morning (which was exacerbated by the fact that you fell off the couch when your dad re-woke you up), you were back to your cheerful self. You were excited to help me make stir-fry for dinner, and you are looking forward to starting bass lessons soon. You’ve been having after-school online playdates with your good friend Kit, and you plan to do more outdoor play later this week. You two, along with his sister, had a great summer together. You gave yourself a group nickname (The Screwdrivers), biked all over the neighborhood, ate a lot of ice cream, and discussed topics as wide-ranging as Afghanistan and Minecraft.

A lot of our family decisions lately have been at least partially been for my mental health. I hope it’s not too selfish of me. I struggle with guilt over that sometimes. I absolutely prioritize your needs, but I also have to put on my own face mask before I can help others, you know? The biggest was having you do online school, because I didn’t know if I could handle the constant worry of sending you to school in a mask-optional state. Another concession to my needs was a last-minute mini-vacation. That was a lot less controversial. I’m so glad we took it. I really need a getaway now and then, even a small one, in order to feel happy. Everyone else seemed to enjoy it as well. We rented a small house on a lake in northern Illinois, near the Wisconsin border. We did a lot of kayaking, cocktail hours, and relaxing. We made s’mores, swam, and watched The Simpsons.

We took a day trip to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, which is a resorty sort of town on a beautiful lake. Just outside of town is an attraction called Safari Lake Geneva, which may have been the biggest hit of the whole trip. It’s a wildlife park in which the animals roam freely and visitors drive slowly through in their cars. We fed the animals a grain mix provided by the park, and you and your brothers all had fun doing it. We saw giraffes, bison, lots of antelope-type creatures, and a zebra. Callum hugged a donkey and chased a pot-bellied pig around the petting zoo area. It was a great way to do something interesting and unusual without having to be around crowds.

When we got home from our trip, it was nearly your birthday, so I scrambled to get a party together for you. You invited the Screwdrivers and another good friend over for outdoor water games, pizza, and cake. It was simple but fun, and you thanked me so many times and so sweetly. I know you crave friend time, so I was glad to give you the chance to spend your birthday with them. I really got the hang of filling tiny water balloons. You really got the hang of bursting them on people. You included Callum very kindly, and I think it was a great success.

Another change this month is that you got glasses. Your prescription isn’t very strong, so you haven’t been wearing them all the time, but you said they really improve how sharply you see distant objects. You wore them kayaking and got to enjoy the scenery across the lake. I think you look super cute in them.

Your current favorites: Chex Mix, both homemade and store-bought; hangouts with the Screwdrivers; listening to audiobooks; helping in any way you can; sleeping in the top bunk; Minecraft; and dancing around with abandon.

You have a strong mind, a strong heart, and a strong character, my precious Tobin. I’m so lucky to be your mom. Thank you for your patience and sacrifices as we work our way through what I hope are our last months of serious abnormality.

Strike that: who wants to be normal? I love you weird. No normal person could have a sparkle like yours.

Love for a hundred more decades,

Mom

Dear Callum,

What a summer it’s been for you. In June, we heard from  friends that the local Parks & Rec department was running a daily park playtime for area kids. Since it was held right in our back yard, I signed you up and sent you over. For the first few weeks, you came home after only an hour or so, but as the summer moved along, you got more and more confident. You played with other kids, did lots of arts and crafts, and bonded with the counselors. We called it camp, to help you feel like a big deal like your brothers who go to camps. The idea was that it would help you gain some independence in preparation for attending first grade in person.

Well, that didn’t work out. As much as I think it would be good for you to go to school in person, with the surging rates of delta variant COVID and your current unvaccinated state (with the possibility that the vaccine won’t even be available to you until winter), I just couldn’t stomach it. You were thrilled, actually. I’ve heard a lot of families say that their kids had a bad experience with online school last year, but you had a very positive experience. You liked your teachers, you did fine with Zoom, and between our work at home and the work your teachers put in, you learned a lot. I have the flexibility of schedule to support you, and while it will mean sacrificing some of my ability to work, it’s worth it to me. You said you want to do online school forever. I certainly hope it doesn’t come to that, but I guess we’ve proven we can do it.

I felt conflicted, of course, but worrying about you going to school was seriously impacting my mental health. I told your dad that if we sent you and Tobin (also unvaccinated) to school in person, I was going to have to get therapy. It just wasn’t healthy for me to keep living the way I was, sleeping terribly due to worry, feeling sick to my stomach all the time, crying every day. Our schools are prohibited by state law from requiring masks, and even among those kids whose parents send them with masks, it’s a long shot to expect them to wear masks consistently and correctly. It’s bad enough that I have to be concerned about the chance of Miles getting a breakthrough infection from an unmasked classmate and bringing it home to you. Now my current worry is that I’m being selfish and doing this for me more than for you. As much as I want to wrap all three of you up in bubble wrap with little airholes in front of your faces, I recognize that Miles really needs to go to school. It will certainly be better once all three of you are vaccinated. For the time being, we’re going to have to sit with this compromise.

Photo by Denny

We’ve had a lot of outdoor fun this summer, including a couple of trips to splash in the downtown fountain. We went to the water park near Mubby and Skitter’s house, and you were very brave about going down the kids’ slide and dunking your head in the water. We’re getting ready for a mini-vacation to a lake cottage, and I hope we can enjoy some nice time together, making s’mores over the fire pit and enjoying some relaxed time together. I don’t know how good it is for swimming, or if you’d even want to swim in a body of water that doesn’t smell like chlorine, but I’ll pack your swimsuit just in case.  I think and your brothers may be more excited about the video game machine we saw in the cottage’s VRBO pictures. We’ll try to find a balance of activities.

A major development for you this summer was the loss of your first tooth. I don’t know why, since you got your bottom teeth first, but you lost a top front tooth. Your dentist noticed it was loose at a recent appointment, and an ear of corn threw the final blow while we were visiting Mubby and Skitter. Your new one hasn’t started to grow in yet, so you’ll definitely get that gap-toothed first grade picture that is such a mantle classic. The online program is holding a special school pictures day in a safe(r) environment, so I think we’ll do that. I liked the not-school portraits I took of you and your brothers last fall, but there’s something about that mottled blue background that marks the year in its own inimitable way.

We’ve been playing a lot of King’s Quest lately, a game series from my childhood that you really enjoy. You usually want me to read the captions out loud, and they are very wordy in number six, the version we’ve been playing the most often lately. I try to make you do a good amount of the reading, and I’m glad to say that your reading skills are still strong after a summer away from school.

Your current favorites: granola bars; Skitter Mix (2:1 blend of lemonade and orange juice); “chicken bones” (aka drumsticks); YouTube videos; making your own toys and inventions with sticks, gaffer’s tape, and various household objects; King’s Quest (mostly number six), the books Little Rabbit’s Loose Tooth, Laura Joffe Numeroff’s If You Give a… series, and Move Over, Rover.  We have a whole routine of actions that go with the text in Move Over, Rover, and we have fun doing it together every night. You also have an extended goodnight routine that involves me kissing you and your stuffed animals and saying rhymes we’ve adapted from another book. It’s tough when I have heavy nighttime lip moisturizer on and I have to kiss Stuffle the Panda, but I do it because it’s a lot easier to pick some fluff off my lips than face the consequences of skipping any part of the routine.

Consistency and stability mean a lot to kids, which is another reason why I had hoped to send you to in-person school in the fall. Right now it’s looking like we’ll have to make a mid-year switch, which isn’t ideal. I’m hoping that, much like camp, you take to it after a brief transition period. I’m sure you can. I need to trust that you’re smart and capable. It’s okay to be scared. I’m scared too. We’ll work on it.

Photo by Denny

I love you so much, sweet Callum. Off we go into another learning adventure together. We can do it.

Love,

Mommy

Dear Miles,

We’re wrapping up the last weeks of summer now, and you’re feeling ready to get back to school. Even though the vaccine doesn’t offer 100% protection, I’m hoping that between it and masking on your part, you’ll have a safe school experience. It seems to be your instinct to hide out in your room all the time, but you’ve been doing some camps and other activities lately, and your mood is remarkably better when you get out and do this. I understand your position. It’s my natural inclination to get hermity too, but I also recognize that forcing myself to be active and socialize is good for my mood and outlook. You don’t have the motivation to prod yourself yet, so I will do my motherly duty by prodding you.

You had a physical recently, and your doctor confirmed what we could guess by looking at you: you’re skinny. She suggested more meat and vegetables after learning about your all-carb diet, and she also gave you the green light for eating ice cream every day. Predictably, the latter recommendation is the one that has stuck, and the whole family gets a kick out of reminding you to take your “prescription.” I doubt a daily bowl of ice cream is going to do much, since your dad says he couldn’t put weight on despite all his efforts when he was a kid, too. I know it is hard to fathom now, but time will catch up to you, and by the time you’re his age, you’ll probably be merely slim as well. Your feet are enormous. I think they grew four shoe sizes last year, so I suspect you still have quite a bit of height left to acquire. I hope your weight can keep up with it. It’s not often that a doctor suggests adding more butter to food, so enjoy it while it lasts.

Luckily for you, this week is FilmScene animation camp, one of your favorite summer activities. It’s not cheap, but you love it, and included in the price is lunch and two snacks every day. The snacks are always movie theater popcorn, and FilmScene has the best popcorn. I was also surprised and pleased to learn that you’ve been enjoying the provided lunch. In previous years, I always had to pack you food to supplement the lunch, since your picky eating style meant you didn’t want much of it. This time, you haven’t touched your backpack snacks. I don’t know if we’ve achieved any kind of breakthrough in your eating habits, but it’s a positive step. We thought it was your last year to be eligible for the camp, but you said today that the teacher said you have one more year you could attend. You were happy to learn that. We’d bandied about the idea of asking if you could be an assistant teacher for younger kids, but I think you’d rather stay a student.

Callum is going to miss you so much when you go to school in a couple of weeks. He’s doing online school for at least part of the year, until he’s vaccinated. You’ve spent so much time together in the last year-plus, and he’s gotten so attached to you. You two have always gotten along well, but he’s so happy when you spend time with him. Lately you’ve been playing Riddle School with him, a computer game you enjoyed when you were younger. He basks in your attention. I dearly hope you don’t get a breakthrough infection that you bring home to him and Tobin. It’s a tough balancing act, and I’m a pretty risk-averse person (the Michael Jackson impersonator was about the only part of Las Vegas I enjoyed). You really need to get back among your friends in a normal-ish school environment, though. Online school went well for all three of you kids, but it was the toughest on you. I hope it doesn’t come down to quarantining you in your bedroom, but if anyone could handle it, it would be you. I could push linguine under the door. The extra butter will help it slide right through the gap.

We’re going on a mini-vacation next week to a lake cottage in northern Illinois, near the Wisconsin border. My ideal vacation would be going to museums all morning (too indoorsy for our group), swimming in the ocean all afternoon (no oceans within a reasonable drive), and eating in a great restaurant at night (definitely no indoor dining for us). That means redefining an ideal vacation, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and finding some fun together. You’re not a big nature-lover, so I’m not sure if the kayaking and hiking will appeal to you, but the rental description promises good wifi. You do enjoy s’mores, so I made sure to get ingredients for those. Maybe you’ll hang out by the fire pit with us for more than six minutes.

I’m not sure exactly what we’re going to do on the trip, but I did find a restaurant nearby with outdoor picnic-style seating. We’ll have to scope it out to see if the spacing is reasonable for our (my) risk assessment, but take-out is an option too. They specialize in hot dogs, fries, and root beer, which sounded good to you. It will also be important to identify a local ice cream shop to make sure you stay sufficiently medicated. I’ve assigned you the task of making a double-batch of Chex Mix, which is your culinary specialty. Mubby taught you to make it, and now you handle our family’s Chex Mix needs when she’s not around. I appreciate it. It’s tasty.

Your current favorites: Goldfish crackers, Honey Nut Cheerios, pasta, lemonade, chatting online and texting with your friends, FilmScene camp, froyo, making “That’s what she said” jokes, saying “You’ll learn in fifth grade health class” to your brothers when they don’t get your “That’s what she said” jokes, and wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants. You finally opted for a t-shirt and shorts today, which was a wise decision, as it’s ninety degrees and humid out.

It’s not always easy to let you make your own decisions, but I recognize that letting you have more independence is an important part of your development. For the moment, I will still insist that you at least eat some fruit with your dinner. Despite what Homer Simpson says, purple is not a fruit.

Off we go, my sweet Miles. I hope eighth grade treats you well.

Love,

Mom