Dear Tobin,

I’m writing this as we wind down from Christmas 2021, which has been a quiet affair but a nice one. You were really excited about the holidays this year, counting down the days, shaking presents, and helping bake cookies. You’re always an enthusiastic person, but this year I found your spirit to be especially inspiring. I felt more in a holiday mood than usual, too. It’s been fun to see you go above your usual levels of excitement, which are pretty high already.

You got some good presents, had fun picking out items for your annual draw-a-sibling’s-name gift exchange, and writing a note to go with Santa’s milk and cookies. You enjoyed eating plenty of milk and cookies, too.

Your strongest interest right now is the NBA. You’ve been watching a lot of basketball with your dad, and a challenge you’ve set for yourself is to be able to list all 30 NBA teams. You can usually do it when you write them down. You have your favorite teams and favorite players, and you’re always trying to engage other family members in NBA talk. Your dad likes basketball but generally pays more attention to college teams than NBA, so you sometimes find yourself frustrated. I try to chime in sometimes, but I’m no help—I can never remember that the Washington Wizards are from D.C., not the state. Over the holiday, you were telling Uncle Joe about your strategies for listing out all the teams, and he was impressed by the different techniques you use. You have categories, such as teams with animal names, teams from states with multiple teams, and teams with fire-related names. I could only think of the Phoenix Suns for that one, but you say the Miami Heat also count. I don’t know if there are any others.

It’s long been part of your nature to get obsessed with an idea for a relatively short amount of time, so it will be interesting to see how long this phase lasts. After taking last year off, I signed you up for parks and rec basketball starting later in January. You’re fully vaccinated now, and you’ll be heading back to school in-person after winter break. I’m not completely comfortable with it, given the extremely high transmissibility of the omicron variant, but everyone in our family is now as vaccinated and boosted as allowed by the FDA. Fortunately, omicron appears not to be too serious in vaccinated people who still get it. We will continue to take advantage of the handy Test Iowa program for regular screening and definitely before visiting with older family members.

What’s slightly trickier is planning our upcoming travel. Our every-other-year trip to the Florida Keys is scheduled to happen in March, and we’ve already rented our condo. Despite much higher levels of cases worldwide this time as compared to two years ago, I’m still pretty comfortable going. We have tools now: vaccines, KF94 masks, and access to a direct flight from Chicago to Miami. The Keys also offers a lot of outdoor activities, so even if we need to limit our recreation, we should still have plenty we can safely do. We skipped our dolphin swim last time, and that was something you were really hoping to do. I think we can make it happen this time around. I did buy travel insurance that allows for cancellation to due COVID, so if someone in our family has the bad luck of coming down with it close to departure time, we can reschedule for the summer. I’ve promised you we’ll go one way or another. Some of my most wonderful memories are of the early morning beach walks you and I take together, and I know we’ll find a way to do it.

You’re really excited to start school again. You were disappointed to learn that you won’t be in the same class as your best friend, but you did a Zoom with your new class, and that got you pumped up. You said the teacher seems nice, that some of your other friends are in the class, and that they get to do some fun things. I’m really grateful for how well you’ve handled online learning up until this point, and I’m also so glad that you’re going back. It’s not great for my anxiety levels, but there’s more to your development than keeping me comfortable all the time. I know you’ll miss some of the friends you made through online school, but chances are you’ll see them again when junior high time comes. That will be sooner than I care to consider.

It will also be good for you to have more direct interaction with your peers. While you mostly get along well with your siblings, you have the fieriest personality in our family. We have to assign your spot at the dining room table thoughtfully, because you tend to spar with whichever sibling is closest. You are usually very sweet to Callum, but you can wind each other up to the degree that it becomes a lot for the other diners to handle. Artemis is witty and sends a lot of zingers your way. You’re witty too, but you’re also three-and-a-half years younger, so it frustrates you when you can’t keep up. Usually both of you laugh through it, but sometimes the banter gets so barbed that I can’t handle it. That’s something you’ll need to remember in school: not everyone can laugh off an insult like you, and not everyone is prepared to engage in the battles of wits that you and Art enjoy. Going back to school will give you some valuable experience in learning the nuances of other people’s personalities.

Your current favorites: the NBA, playing online and outside with your friend Kit, pizza, audiobooks and traditional books (especially those written by Stuart Gibbs), your bass lessons, mashing together vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup, and watching the show Psych with your dad.

I’m very proud of you, Tobin, for making it through some big challenges over the last nearly two years. More challenges are to come, of course, but I look forward to facing them with you. You add joy and vigor to any room you enter, and it’s been a privilege to spend so much time in rooms with you.

Love,

Mom

Dear Callum,

These are some important days for you. At the end of this week, you’ll be finishing up what I hope is your last time as an online student. You had an excellent experience with a wonderful teacher this year. When we chose to change your enrollment to in-person, it had not yet been determined which teachers would keep teaching online and which would go back to their home schools. We gambled on the wonderful Mrs. Davis being reassigned to her physical elementary school, which is not the one you and Tobin will attend. As it turns out, she’s going to continue teaching online. That’s a bummer, because if we’d known that, we might not have made the same decision. However, it’s not a bad thing for you to go back to school in-person. Your future teacher is brand new to the school (and, I suspect, to teaching). We did a Zoom with her and your future classmates this morning, and she seemed kind. She also volunteered to come to our house tomorrow to get to know you better, so I hope that works out. There’s a windstorm in the forecast, and I’m still a little emotionally damaged from the derecho of 2020. I certainly hope it isn’t that bad, but I’m already formulating a plan. It involves hanging out in the basement and putting food in coolers.

You’ve had a little bit of nervousness about changing to in-person school, particularly because you’ll miss your teacher (and your best friend from your online class, John Farmer). You seemed to enjoy talking to your new teacher today, though, and you’ll probably adjust quickly.

One thing about you lately is that you get quite emotional about things, but you get over it pretty quickly. It seems like every night you cry about something. I imagine that’s due to being tired—everything always seems worse when a person is tired. Your sources of your sadness range from the reasonable (leaving Mrs. Davis’s class) to the moderate (the destruction of a house you built in Minecraft) to the absurd (Scaredy Squirrel in the eponymous bedtime story was scared of a bee rather than appreciating its usefulness). You also cried when you found out Leonardo da Vinci died. I assured you that he lived to be very, very old and accomplished thousands of wonderful things in his life. Later we found out he only lived to be 67, so that didn’t help.

You’ve been doing all kinds of different projects lately, both school-based and of your own invention. We have a family rule that you don’t do screen time before 3:00 p.m., which usually leaves you with an hour or more to fill after your last school Zoom. You get up to all kinds of creative endeavors. Today you made a wand with the letter E on it, and you wrote words that change with the magic of a “Super E.” You and Tobin get into all kinds of loud and wild Pokémon battles. I don’t understand the details of them, but there’s a lot of shouting. Now and then it ends with someone getting upset, but usually it’s a pretty fun way for you two to play together.

The freedom and flexibility of online school have let you explore your own interests, and I hope getting back to a traditional school environment doesn’t stifle that too much. You’ll also face the challenge of dealing with classmates’ behavior issues. Right now, if a student is being disruptive, your teacher can just mute him or her and move on with the rest of class. That isn’t so easy in person. But your school has a wide variety of students with a wide variety of needs, and I guess it’s good for you to gain some experience working and learning with people other than your family members.

This is also your last month of being six. As the youngest kid in the family, I think I imagine you as more of a baby than you really are. Seven sounds so much older than six, and that’s how old your eldest sibling was when you were born. That didn’t seem so tiny to me then, but as our household’s littlest member, you often get the baby treatment. Your dad jokingly said you should go back to five on this birthday instead of moving forward to seven. I expected you to say no way, since kids are usually excited to move to the next age, but you liked the idea. You look like a seven-year-old, with one front tooth missing and the other getting pretty wiggly. You have the vocabulary of someone older and the tender heart of your own sweet self.

Your current favorites: being fully vaccinated (technically not till tomorrow), Pokémon battles, comfy pants, Knoppers, playing the Mario Maker levels Artemis builds, meat in most forms, rainbow sherbet, the Mercy Watson books, weird YouTube videos of other people playing video games, and opening the daily flap on your Advent calendar.

You’re a treat, Callum. I am really going to miss watching you learn every day. I’ve seen you go from a nervous little kindergartner who was too shy to participate in class Zooms to a kid who is a bit overzealous with the Unmute button. You’ve learned to read, to do more complicated math, all kinds of science concepts, and how to use breakout rooms effectively. A lot of adults have a hard time with that. I know it will be good for you to do your learning away from me, but you’re going to do great. Even though I wish you could go back to being five, I know that a smart, wonderful seven-year-old is ready to emerge. You, my fully-vaccinated sweetheart, are going to kick some in-person first-grade butt.

Love,

Mommy

Dear Artie,

It occurs to me that this is your last monthly letter of your thirteenth year. Just a month from now, you’ll be fourteen and over halfway through eighth grade. Things have really been going well for you lately. We got your first trimester grades, and you got straight-As (with one A- in P.E. and several A+s in other subjects). You seem to be enjoying school a lot, and a recent email from your principal reminded me that you’ll soon be registering for classes at the high school. On one hand, that’s hard for me to fathom. On the other hand, you’ve grown a lot lately. I was trying to get a Christmas card organized, which I still haven’t finished, and I put a search filter on my photos to find ones of you from 2021. You look noticeably different in the photos from around your thirteenth birthday, to the extent that I had to reject those because they would give our friends and family a false impression of you.  You’re growing up, for sure, and it won’t be long before the high school is just the right place for you.

At a recent scoliosis check-up, they measured you at 5’5.5″, which is creeping dangerously close to my own height. I think you’ve already passed both your grandmothers, and if your hands and feet are any indication, you’re not done growing. Your spine seems to be responding well to treatment. I’m so proud of the maturity you’ve displayed regarding your regimen. You don’t complain about wearing your brace for the prescribed hours or doing physical therapy. Your recent X-rays show that your brace is effectively holding your spine in position, so as long as you continue to wear it faithfully and do your exercises as your growth continues, you’re on track to have a straight spine without needing surgery. I was worried that you would feel self-conscious, but you told your friends right away and showed them when you wore it to school. You’ve decided to wear it over night rather than to school during the day, but I think that’s more of a convenience issue than from any kind of embarrassment. You seem confident and unbothered by it from a social perspective.

I admire that about you. At your age, I don’t think I would have had that self-assuredness. I remember it being a big deal in eighth grade when I took the brave stand of quitting the practice of tight-rolling my jeans (honestly, what were we thinking with that style? I can’t believe it took me as long as it did to quit). I don’t know if it’s something inherent in your personality, the effort that your school puts into supporting self-expression and condemning bullying, or the support you get from your friends. In any case, I’m proud of you.

Your dad has been taking you to your orthopedist appointments, and I’ve been handling your appointments with the physical therapist and doing your PT with you at home in the evenings. I don’t mind helping you with it, because it’s ten minutes a day when I just stand (or sit, depending on the exercise) with my hands on your ribcage and feel you breathe. During your infancy, I worried all the time about SIDS. Of course, I did all the things I was supposed to do to reduce the risk (putting you on your back to sleep, breastfeeding, not exposing you to cigarette smoke), but to some extent, it was out of my control. I spent many, many hours with my hand on your tiny ribcage, verifying that it was still expanding and contracting.

A lot of things seem out of my control right now. Some of that is natural and healthy. Of course I want you to develop your own interests, have friends, and have adventures without your family. That kind of loss of control, while uncomfortable, also has a sense of correctness to it. It’s in tune with the natural order. Other things, like COVID and school shootings, are far from what I can intellectualize as appropriate. I can’t control every bit of your behavior, and I certainly can’t control the behavior of others outside our family. But I promise that if you ever ask for help, if you’re hurt and struggling, I will find a way to help you. My heart aches so much for the devastated people in Michigan, where a desperate kid asked for help, and his garbage parents did nothing but encourage the mindset and behavior that led to his murderous rampage. I wish you didn’t live in a world where school shootings happen so often.

You are good about wearing your mask, though, so that helps my brain a little. You’ve been invited to some social gatherings lately. While I don’t love the idea of you congregating in large groups (especially in busy restaurants and other public spaces that don’t have the mask mandate in place at your school), I have the impression that you’re trust-worthy about keeping your mask on. Obviously that only helps to a certain extent; for mask-wearing to be a truly effective public health strategy, everyone needs to practice it. But, as I mentioned above, I have no influence over the general population. I’m just glad you’re willing to make some compromises in exchange for the privilege of some new freedoms. I’m doing the same thing: I am compromising some of my own desire to wrap you up in a blanket and hug you all day, safe in our home, in exchange for the privilege of one day having your smart, kind, independent adult self in my life.

I have made it quite clear that you are always welcome with me. No matter where I am, there will always be a place for you. Even if it’s metaphorical, you can be with me.

Your current favorites: Mario Maker (including lots of time watching Callum play the levels you built), the cartoon Phineas and Ferb, online and in-person hangouts with friends, pasta, Goldfish crackers, watching the show Psych with your dad and Tobin, and doing the same sight gag every time we do physical therapy. It involves acting like you’re going to fall over while you’re strapped to the leg of the piano. It’s kind of goofy, but you put up with my frequent repetitions of the facts that 1. I like doing PT because I sort of get to hug you, and 2. my favorite exercise is the one where we lie on the floor. We’re even.

Thank you, my dear, for not being too cool to do family stuff with us. I try not to force it, because you do get grumpy with us somethings and decline to participate, but just as often you show up without complaint. I enjoyed getting our Christmas tree from our favorite local farm with you, and you chipped in on the tree-decorating efforts at home, too. I hope you look back on these years, which are difficult for every teenager but are particularly difficult during these current events, and know that your family (and most, most, most especially your mama) has your back.

Love,

Mom

December 3, 2021:

“My foot feels like…Sprite.” – Callum, who had apparently been in one position too long.

December 2, 2021: