Dear Artemis,

Your fourteenth year seems to be going pretty well so far. You’re wrapping up your second trimester at school, getting new grades, and thinking about what you’ll take next fall in high school. High school, my goodness. In yet another move toward independence, you’ve chosen French over Spanish for your foreign language. While I think any foreign language learning is good, it seems silly to not learn the overwhelming second language of our country. Plus I was sort of hoping to be a chaperone on a Spain trip down the road. But…your friends are taking French, so you’re taking French. Mon dieu.

I was afraid I was going to have to twist your arm to get you to stay in band, since you don’t seem very enthusiastic about it, but you added it to your schedule with no prodding. We attended a webinar the other night about the band program, and the director seems very enthusiastic and welcoming. Band takes some cool trips, too, including an international one every three years. There are a ton of other electives offered, including some really interesting-sounding ones, and I hope you get to try some of those out down the road.

You’ve been mostly pretty pleasant lately, including keeping a good attitude about the annoying requirements in your life. You haven’t had the opportunity to do a lot of in-person socializing with your friends, but you did hang out with friends last week, and you told me you wore your mask the whole time. Fortunately, Covid numbers are going down. Of the many people I know who’ve gotten the omicron variant, none has had a serious case in the medical sense. A lot of the adults have felt pretty awful, but it sounds like it wasn’t too hard on any of the kids. Obviously, I still want to avoid us getting it as much as possible. I won’t truly breathe a sigh of relief until we’ve all gotten negative tests before going on our spring break trip. We haven’t been on a plane since the very, very early days of Covid. In fact, we nearly canceled our every-other-year Florida Keys trip in March 2020 due to the impending doom. We did cancel our flight back and made the long, long drive. I certainly don’t want to do that again. This trip will, I hope, be a bit of a mental bookend for our Covid experience. I know there will be more variants, more vaccine boosters, and more surges in the future, but I hope we have enough good health and safety strategies now that we can find a balance between fun and caution.

I’m keeping our precautions tight for now, because I really don’t want to have to reschedule that trip. We’ve all been looking forward to it so much, and while it would be fun any time of year, escaping Iowa in March is extremely appealing. Two years ago, we did basically nothing outside our rental condo. We swam in the pool and the ocean, played Scrabble on the balcony, and occasionally got takeout from our favorite restaurants. This time I’m hoping we can visit some attractions. We’re all fully vaccinated and we have good-quality masks, and tons of restaurants and activities are outdoor-based. It’s time to start having some fun.

It will be interesting to see how it goes flying with your scoliosis brace. We’ve never done that before, but apparently it counts as a medical device, and you can carry it on the plane without an additional fee. We’ve done that before with a car booster seat, so I guess it’s a similar situation. I would feel bad making you wear it the whole flight, since I don’t think it’s very comfortable to wear in a sitting position. It’s going to be challenging enough to make it through the flight without snacks, since I don’t want us to take off our masks on the plane. It’s a good thing you all have electronic entertainment devices.

Much like the mask thing, I’ve been really impressed with how well you’ve dealt with bracing and physical therapy. They’re not your favorite things, but you don’t rage or cry or refuse to wear your brace or do your exercises. Teenagers aren’t known for their long-term thinking skills, but I hope that this is a sign that you see the benefit of incremental work now to avoid a big surgery down the road.

You and your brothers had been campaigning to buy a virtual reality headset, though I haven’t heard you talk about it much lately. Maybe that stage has passed. Either way, while you were in the thick of it, you and Callum made your own VR headset with an old Goldfish box, a baseball cap, and your phone mounted inside it somehow. You call it the Artculus Goldfish. I don’t know if the user could see or experience much, but it smelled good. I was sort of hoping you’d get a real one because I wanted to do the underwater experiences. I think the Smithsonian Museums also have games (I’m not sure if that’s actually what you call them) where you can experience the museums virtually. My ideal vacation would involve going to a different museum every day, but most of my family disagrees with that. It seems like a good way for me to get some art, science, and history experiences without having to hear any whining. Better yet, it might get you excited about visiting some of those places in person. Maybe I’ll have to plant some seeds in your heads to get you back on the VR-purchase track.

Your current favorites: watching Psych with your dad and brothers, pasta with tomato sauce, pasta without tomato sauce, Doritos, Mario Maker, chatting online with your friends, speed-running King’s Quest IV (that is, trying to beat the game in the fastest possible time), hanging around in your Comfy blanket/sweatshirt thing, and playing with Callum.

Next month at this time, we’ll be packing and organizing and getting ready to hit to road, negative-tests willing. I’m excited to get back to some of our favorite haunts and check out some new places as well. I hope you’ll make time for a few games of vacation-rules Scrabble with me on the balcony, too.

Love,

Mom