Dear Tobin,

Yesterday evening, you were hanging out with my in my bedroom, and you said, “I’m glad I’m not a typical middle child.” What you meant was that you don’t fit the stereotype of a middle child who gets lost in the shuffle, neither the eldest nor the baby, always having to run interference for someone and rarely getting the parents’ full attention. I don’t know how accurate that portrayal is, because I didn’t grow up in a family that had a middle child, but I can say that it would be difficult to lose you in any shuffle. Your high energy, boisterous laugh, and knack for adding zest to any situation make you unignorable.

Photo by Gary Clarke

This morning I was asking you how online school is going. Unlike Callum, you need almost no help managing your Zoom sessions or keeping up with your assignments. You’ve also added ELP into the mix, as well as a complex after-school schedule that’s a blend of online gaming and outdoor play with your neighborhood best friend. Because you’re so good at keeping yourself organized, I have to remember to check in with you. Today, I asked you whether you’ve gotten to know the kids in your online class. Last year, it was mostly made up of people you already knew from your normal elementary school. Things changed this year, and now it’s a blend of kids from all over the district. You said you’ve become friends with some of your classmates and have Google Hangouts with them.

Nevertheless, you hope to return to in-person school at the beginning of second trimester, which is right before Thanksgiving. I can’t make any promises in that area, but Pfizer has indicated that they’ve found dosage for kids ages five through twelve that’s both safe and effective. Now the FDA has to review those findings, but as soon as the vaccine receives EUA, you can bet we’ll be getting it for you and Callum. We’re cautiously optimistic that it will happen toward the end of October. That means you wouldn’t have full immunity by the time second trimester started, but you’re very conscientious about wearing your mask, so it seems like a reasonable compromise.

I’m so heartened by how well you’ve rolled with the challenges the last year and a half have brought, Tobin. I know the limitations on social interaction are hardest on you than anyone else in the family, and your dad and I have worked to find you ways to meet those needs. You’ve been doing really well in your outdoor taekwondo class, and you’re planning to test for your green belt soon. Usually your dad takes you to that, but a schedule issue required me to the other night. I had a chance to chat a little bit with your teacher. He had glowing things to say about the focus and dedication you display.

You’ve also started bass lessons, and I’ve been really impressed with your determination. You’re hoping to play on one song in our upcoming Family Folk Machine concert, and with that goal in mind, you’ve been practicing and improving a lot. Your teacher is part of the larger Family Folk Machine community, so he understands your purpose and is helping you get there. I’ll be proud to have you plucking away up there with me.

I’ve been dreading the end of the beautiful fall weather because of how much it will limit your access to social activities, but if you can safely attend school in person, that will go far in filling the void. I’m interested to see how you do re-adapting to a traditional school environment. You’re a wiggly person, and the family joke is that you never sit through a whole meal without jumping out of your chair to go do something. You’ve had a fair amount of autonomy doing school online, with the freedom to get up whenever you need to without disrupting the class. That won’t fly in school, so you’ll have to learn to manage your energy in other ways. I’m not worried about you falling behind academically. Our district has done a great job providing both synchronous and asynchronous instruction to students, and schoolwork has never been a big challenge for your anyway. The readjustment for you will be acclimating to the structural expectations of school. I’m not worried that you won’t be able to do it. I have great confidence in you. I just anticipate a bit of a transition period when you need to run a few laps around the house when you get home every day.

Your current favorites: biking around the neighborhood with the Screwdrivers, sitting on the porch swing with me, playing bartender for your brothers on family cocktail hour nights, playing Minecraft with your friends, and planning dream vacations. You haven’t made a final decision on your eleven-year-old trip, but an RV rental and road tripping are on the short list. We’re also optimistically planning for our Florida Keys trip this spring, and you’re looking forward to the dolphin swim we had planned for last time but chose to skip given the emerging COVID situation. Once you’re fully-vaccinated, which you surely will be by spring, we’ll be able to open up our options a lot.

Photo by Gary Clarke

It will probably take some years and mental distance before you’re able to do meaningful reflection on world events and their effect on your life. When that time comes, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. You always have thoughts, and you’re always interested in sharing them, and that’s one more reason you’re unignorable. Besides, I wouldn’t want to ignore you even if I could. You’re way too much fun.

Love,

Mom

Dear Callum,

The summer is over, and now you’re a first grader. Because you can’t be vaccinated yet, we decided to keep you in online school for now. Unlike Tobin, who is champing at the bit to return to in-person school, you’re perfectly happy with the decision. You say it’s because you’re afraid of getting COVID, and that may be true to some extent, but you also are nervous about change. You had a mostly good experience last year, so you’re fine with a lot more Zooms.

As it turns out, this year so far is going even better than last year. You’re already familiar with all the software tools, and your teacher is great. She’s really organized and seems to have an excellent handle on how to manage her class. I bet she’s a fantastic in-person teacher too, but I’m very grateful that you have her this year. She’s kind and personable, and you were excited to meet her for real when we went to her house last weekend to pick up some additional school supplies she gathered for her students. You also think she’s good-looking, which doesn’t hurt.

Photo by Gary Clarke

Last year it took you a while to feel comfortable participating in class discussions, but this year we’ve had almost the opposite problem. You sometimes need reminders to quietly raise your hand and wait to be called on rather than unmuting your mic and blurting out a contribution. You have a decent sense of when it is and isn’t appropriate to chime in, so it’s not a terrible situation, but we’ll keep practicing. In any case, I’m glad you’re actively involved in class.

You love to do spin-off activities, whether suggested or of your own invention. During your first week of school, your teacher read you a story about a refugee girl whose only friend in her new home was a rock onto which she’d painted a face. I’m not sure you got everything that story had to offer, but you had fun making a rock friend of your own. You also like making swords and other weapons out of a kit that was intended for making blanket forts. I will never understand it, and I know I’m not the only weapon-disinclined parent to feel dismayed about it. You don’t exclusively make weapons, though. You made yourself a little reading nook out of cement blocks in the back yard, complete with a cup holder and a little resting pad for the book. You took me that’s in case you want to take a break from reading and make a prediction of what will happen next in the story.

Before the summer ended, we took a mini-vacation. You had fun kayaking and swimming, but I think your favorite part was making friends with a donkey at a wildlife park. You loved that guy. Your other favorite aspect of the trip was taking showers. The cottage we rented didn’t have a bathtub, so you took showers out of necessity. You weren’t so sure about that at first, but Tobin was helpful about showering with you. Once we got home, you decided that showers were your thing moving forward. I think you’ve only taken about two baths since we got back several weeks ago, and the rest of the time you’ve used the downstairs shower. You really like using grown-up shampoo, conditioner, and body wash, too. Sometimes you use them to an unsanctioned extent, and I have to send you back into the shower for an additional rinse after you get out. You’ve gotten into the habit of drawing a little friend for yourself in the condensation on the shower wall. You tell me his name is Cookie Dough.

I’m proud of all the growing and learning you’re doing, Callum. Your reading skills are getting stronger all the time. When it’s your turn to read aloud in school, you glide right through it. You like to do things “right,” which sometimes makes it hard for you to sound out words when you’re writing. You don’t like to guess, so you want me to tell you exactly how to spell everything. I recognize that you’ll learn more if you try on your own, so I prefer not to just give you answers, but sometimes I cave. It will be interesting to see how your approach changes when you go to school in person and the teacher doesn’t have the bandwidth to spell words for every student. We haven’t decided yet whether you’ll go in person as soon as you’re vaccinated. As much as I know it would be good for you, you’re also having a great experience online this year, and it might be hard on you to switch mid-year and be the new kid in a mostly-new situation. You’ve been to your home elementary school plenty of times, for preschool and for your brother’s events, but it’s been a while. That’s something your dad and I will have to decide when the moment arrives.

We still don’t have a firm timeline for when you’ll receive your vaccines, though we’re optimistic that it could be yet this fall. I read conflicting information all the time, so I’m not investing emotionally in any estimate that I see. It will be a huge relief, because while the vaccines don’t prevent all COVID infections, they absolutely reduce the risk of serious cases and hospitalizations. As a healthcare employee, I see the daily statistics about COVID+ inpatients at our local hospital, and I look especially closely at the number of pediatric inpatients. The numbers have been growing, slowly but consistently, and I know many parents are feeling the same kind of stress we are. Medical professionals definitely are. In the meantime, we’re doing our part by taking precautions to keep you and your brothers as safe as we can, while trying to give you social and recreational opportunities as much as possible. It’s a tough balance, but we’re doing our best.

Your current favorites: pizza, the Pokémon cartoons Tobin showed you, PBSKids games, building things with sticks and tape, cuddling with your stuffed animals at bedtime, and exercising. You’re pretty good at burpees. You’ve been playing Simon Says on your school Zooms, and you wanted to play it with me the other night. You had me doing all kinds of squats and lunges and pushups, and I was a little sore the next day.

You’re smart and funny and always have something interesting to say. You love to think and interpret your world, and I am so happy to watch and listen as you do it.

Love,

Mommy

Oh boy, Miles.

With the possible exception of the month you were born, this feels like the month you’ve been through the most. Because my goal here is not to build suspense and manipulate anyone who reads this, I will say from the start: you are fine. You are doing really well, actually. But this has definitely been quite a month.

You began reentry into quasi-normal life earlier in the summer when you attended a theater camp, but things really picked up speed earlier this month when you did your favorite annual summer activity, Filmscene Animation camp. You did an online version last year, which was fine, but there’s nothing quite like doing a collaborative creative project with like-minded kids. Every day when I picked you up, you were cheerful and excited to talk about your day. It was a complete change from the grumpy, sullen person you’d been lately. You still preferred to close yourself in your room when you get home and spend most of the evening there, but I could tell how good it was for you to get out and see the world in wider perspective.

You made some fun and interesting animations. I loved watching your work on the big screen at your class showcase. It’s available here: https://vimeo.com/icfilmscene. You mostly worked on the short about the penguin (17:00), and I’m probably prejudiced, but I think it’s the best one. My favorite is the quick cuts between closeups of penguin’s eyes and the bean’s eyes. It’s very cinematic.

Before school started, we took a last-minute trip to Long Lake, Illinois, where we rented a cottage and had some low-key fun. We were all grateful for the double batch of Chex Mix you made for the trip, though we could have handled a triple batch. You enjoyed the mini-vacation a lot more than I expected you to. You gave kayaking a try and really enjoyed it. You swam with your brothers at a small beach. You enjoyed the wifi and watching The Simpsons. The biggest surprise was Safari Lake Geneva, which was an attraction a short drive away in which animals roamed freely and guests drove through slowly in their cars. I bought two feed buckets, expecting Tobin and Callum to get a kick out of feeding the animals while you sat. As it turned out, Callum was scared of the ostriches and emus (not without justification), and you were happy to take over his bucket and feed a variety of animals. After we left, you said, “I expected it to be stupid but it was fun.” That’s what many of the reviews said, too, which is why we went.

Inevitably, summer ended. Evitably, you started school in person. The delta variant of COVID is causing all kinds of trouble among our nation’s unvaccinated, including kids like your brothers who are too young to be eligible to be vaccinated. For that reason, those two are continuing with online school, but we decided that your vaccinated status and the generally high rate of mask-wearing among junior high kids made it a reasonable risk. We haven’t had any health scares yet, so for the moment I’m still happy with that decision. You are definitely happy with that decision. Much like after Filmscene camp, you’ve been coming home from school in a good mood, ready to talk about your day over your daily “prescription” of ice cream. You’re playing in the band, spending time with friends new and old, and thus far having a lot less homework than you did last year. You’ve been walking to and from school most days with a group of friends, and having that kind of social interaction has been wonderful for your mood and outlook. Some daily exercise is good for you too, though you don’t like to admit that part.

You’ve also joined a Dungeons & Dragons group hosted by our friend Liam. That’s something you’ve been wanting to try for a long time, so when Liam suggested that he start the group, you and a friend jumped at the opportunity. You’ve had one meeting so far, and it was so much fun that you extended the plan to include another meeting. It’s an interesting and creative pastime, and I’m glad you’re doing it in a supportive environment. On the drive home from the first meeting, you were telling me about a particular situation in which your friend rolled a very high number on the action of kicking the head of a Bullywog, which blasted it into a village far away. You were laughing so hard as you told me the story that you could barely get through it. I didn’t understand all the nuances of the situation, but seeing you so happy and excited about something gave me a smile just as big as yours.

A challenge that has come up this month is the diagnosis of a medical issue. I won’t go into details here, out of respect for your privacy, but anyone reading this should be assured that it’s not life-threatening and it’s treatable. It’s a long-term thing you’ll have to deal with, but we have access to world-renowned medical experts, and we have every reason to believe that things will turn out just fine. I’m sorry you have to handle this on top of everything else that’s going on. The teen years are difficult enough, and then there’s this minor global pandemic, so I wish everything else could be easy. But you seem only mildly annoyed by it right now. That may change when the inconvenience of daily treatment starts to wear on you, but your family has your back.

Your current favorites: hanging out with your friends after school, telling jokes you read on the internet, pasta with tomato sauce (and it’s a very good thing that homemade tomato sauce remains your favorite, because we have an enormous tomato crop this year), your D&D group, and splaying out on your new double bed.

I love the laughter I’ve been hearing from you more often lately, Miles. Your personality has always been on the serious side, and I was afraid that the teen years were going to be one big storm cloud, but there’s still joy in you. I’m so happy to be seeing that side. Even though I wish I could wrap you in bubble wrap with a breathing straw stuck in it, you are giving me more and more evidence that taking some risks is what you need to do to thrive. Sometimes the alpaca steals the food bucket, and sometimes that’s okay, because it’s worth it for the comedy.

Love,

Mom