My sweet Tobin,

We’ve been through some ups and downs this month—more ups than downs, I think, but it’s been emotional in any case. First of all, you wrapped up your basketball season. You had a bit of a rough start, including some frustrations with teammates who weren’t doing things exactly the way you’d prefer, but it worked out. You ended up having a lot of fun and a successful season. At your level, the officials don’t keep score, but it’s usually pretty obvious which team played better. You had some talented players on your team, and I think you “won” all your games. The sweetest victory was the last one, when you played the team that two of your school friends are on. It was a friendly rivalry, but you were pretty happy about the outcome nonetheless.

The last week of your basketball season, the CDC changed its recommendations for mask usage, stating that they no longer recommended masking among people living in counties with low or moderate COVID rates. They also changed their definition of “low” and “moderate” to include data like access to hospitals and hospital bed availability. I feel that unfairly skewed the data, especially in a community like ours with a large hospital. Rates are far lower than they were during the winter’s omicron surge, thank goodness, but they’re still higher than they were last summer. Knowing that you could probably get a bed in a hospital if you needed one doesn’t, to me, justify the risk of our community dropping mask use. About half of your classmates have stopped wearing masks in school, including the friends on the basketball team you played that weekend. Basketball involves a lot of face-to-face interaction, and even though you’re good about wearing your mask, a single mask can only do so much.

After that first week of the school mask mandate being lifted, and just five days before our scheduled departure for our Florida Keys trip, you got a sore throat. I immediately administered a rapid COVID test on you. It was negative, which lowered my anxiety about ten percent, but I know false negatives are a possibility on those tests. We had you take a PCR test, but it was a Sunday and the lab was closed, so results took much longer to come back than they do on our typical Friday testing schedule. I didn’t want you to feel bad or guilty, and I praised you several times for being honest about your sore throat. Still, I was sick with worry. These family vacations mean so much to me. I’ve been waiting for two years for this trip. We’d been looking forward with so much excitement to our dolphin encounter, which we were supposed to do two years ago but canceled. I bought travel insurance that would allow us to get a refund and reschedule our trip if one of us got COVID, but I still would have been extremely sad if we’d had to miss our March trip.

After an excruciating couple of days of waiting, we got your negative PCR test (and another negative rapid antigen test at home in the interim). That was a huge relief. The trip was on, but I was still concerned about your health. Your sore throat evolved into a stuffy head and congested ears. The last time we went to the Keys, you were also getting over a cold (basketball seems to be the common denominator here), and it developed into an ear infection and a pretty miserable time for you. I took you to the doctor, who determined that you didn’t have an ear infection, but you had some impacted wax. She tried to dig it out in the office, but it was a very painful procedure, and she stopped because it was too hard on you. Instead, she suggested some OTC ear drops we could use to dissolve the wax. She also kindly put a note in your chart that, if you got a fever or ear pain or other signs of an ear infection, she would prescribe antibiotics long distance so we wouldn’t have to deal with finding a doctor in the Keys like last time.

The ear drops worked, along with flushing out your ears with warm water and a bulb syringe, and we got a whole lot of goop out of your ears. Your cold was almost better by the time we arrived and totally gone just a couple of days into the trip. Callum is the only other family member who got it, and I credit the protocols we put into place when we suspected COVID: everybody masking in common spaces, eating socially distanced from each other (you ate alone in your room until we got the test results, which you hated), running our air filter fan constantly, and lots of wiping down of doorknobs and faucets with disinfectant wipes.

Our travel down to the Keys was a mixed bag too. We drove to Chicago the night before our flight, which was fine. We all enjoyed our hotel room, including pizza delivery from a nearby joint and hotel waffles the next morning. Unfortunately, some bad weather in central Florida delayed our flight by about four hours. That was rough, because we were still being strict about masking. We ended up finding a quiet area at the airport (a miracle) and took some brief moments of masklessness to sip water and eat the snacks I’d packed. When we finally got on the plane, we were seated right in front of some jerky frat boys whose terrible mask usage was but one reason they were unpleasant to sit near.

Once we got to Miami, though, it was all smooth sailing. Your dad got our car rental upgraded to a luxurious Chrysler Pacifica minivan. About half an hour out of the city, we used a Wendy’s drive-through and agreed that it was the most delicious thing we’d ever eaten (even though they were out of ketchup). We didn’t get the beautiful views we’re used to seeing when we drive down during the day, but the traffic wasn’t bad, and we arrived at our condo without incident. Later, I found out we actually got pretty lucky. A lady I was chatting with in the pool said her friends were supposed to fly out of Chicago on Saturday just like us, but their flight got canceled entirely and they didn’t get down until Monday.

Everything else was wonderful. We did our dolphin encounter, which was so much fun. We owe great thanks to Nana, who gifted us this experience two years ago. It was so disappointing to cancel it then, but we made up for it with a very fun time this year. We got to do all kind of fun things, from petting the dolphins to kissing them to giving them signals. Most of the time, when a person gave a signal, one or sometimes two dolphins would respond and do the trick. When you gave the signal to have a splash fight, two of the dolphins immediately started splashing you, and a third swam up to join in. You also got to hold onto their dorsal fins while they took you on a ride in the water. Skitter asked if it was scary, and you said no. I didn’t think it was scary either. The dolphins seemed so happy and interested in us.

One good thing about the Dolphin Research Center is that all the dolphins are formerly injured ones who were rescued or ones who were born on the property. They haven’t been plucked from the sea for our entertainment. Also, none of them was required to play with us. Two of the dolphins at the station next to us weren’t into it, so they just left, and the trainers invited other ones over. I don’t know as much about dolphins as the researchers there, but it seemed obvious to me that the dolphins were curious and having fun. We attended a session about the research they’re doing into dolphin cognition, and we got to watch one dolphin teach other how to accomplish a task. It was a really special experience, and I’m so glad I got to share it with you, Tobin.

While I’m pretty confident that I’m the person in our family who gets most wound up about family vacations, you’re a close second, and I’m so glad it worked out for us to take this trip. We needed it. I will cherish the traditional Mom-Tobin morning beach walks as long as I live.

Your current favorites: NBA basketball, laundryball (a game you invented that makes me never know where your laundry basket has ended up), Goldfish crackers, pizza, approaching life’s challenges with joy and enthusiasm, the Spy School book series, playing online with your friends, and eating lunch at school. Before our trip, I was picking you up every day and bringing you home for lunch in an effort to protect our family from COVID exposure, but we’ve loosened our restrictions a little now. You seem really happy to be at school with your friends, even if it means a cold lunch. I’m not promising we won’t have to revert to our old, more restrictive practices, because who knows when a new variant will cause a new wave, but you’re enjoying it for now.

I will enjoy you forever, my precious Tobin.

Love,
Mom

Dear Callum,

We’re on the eve of our first big vacation in two years. I asked you if you remembered flying. I figured you probably did, because your last flight was when you were five, and you remember a lot of things. Last night we were reading a book about Leonardo da Vinci, and there was a little quiz at the end. You correctly answered “apprentice” to one of the questions, and when I asked you how you knew that, you said, “It was in the book.” I didn’t remember reading that, but what counts is that you did. Anyway, your answer as to what you remember about flying in an airplane: “There’s a lot of waiting.”

This will be our first time flying masked. Covid rates are down nation-wide, so we’re pretty comfortable about making the trip, but I am insisting that we keep our masks on for the whole time at the airport and the flight. That will mean a long time without using food and beverages as entertainment. I don’t know if our plane will be the kind with individual A/V screens, but I hope so. You and Artemis have chosen to sit together, which is probably a good plan. You two get along well, and hopefully you can keep each other occupied with Switch games, videos, and joke-telling.

Tobin brought a cold home from school. Our school district ended its mask mandate a couple of weeks ago, just in time for our family to have our first cold in two years. I was in a panic for a while until he got three negative Covid tests, because I probably would have lost my mind if we’d had to cancel or postpone the trip. We tried hard to contain the cold to Tobin–we all masked in common areas of the house, he ate socially distanced from the rest of us, and I used a whole lot of cleaning wipes on doorknobs, light switches, and toilet flushers. Still, probably because you are not good at keeping your hands off your face, you were Victim Two. Tobin missed two days of school, but he’s feeling much better now. I’m hoping that by the time we fly, you’ll be doing a lot better too. Right now, you’re pretty cheerful and energetic, just with a runny nose. I bought a bunch of mini Kleenex packs. Your mask will probably be disgusting by the end of our travel day.

Your class is doing a readers’ theater version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears tomorrow, and you’re so excited and proud. You’ll miss a bit of your school day tomorrow due to our travel plans, but fortunately the play is in the morning. Your teacher said she would record it and send the link out, but you know I’ll be watching as it happens. You are playing Mama Bear and Narrator 2. A big advantage to online school is that you can participate even when you’re not feeling your best without exposing your classmates.

One thing I have learned for sure during this pandemic is that making plans is a fraught task. Our current hope is that you’ll return to in-person school in the fall. We had originally planned for you to go once you were vaccinated, but a few different factors, including how great your online teacher is, influenced us to stay with the online program for you. Now, evidence is showing that the vaccine dose you got is almost worthless in terms of preventing symptomatic Covid (especially the omicron variant that surged through our part of the world in January). It does seem to still provide protection against serious disease and hospitalization, which is good, but is disappointing to learn that it doesn’t do all we hoped. I am optimistic that the CDC will recommend a booster dose for your age group soon. In the meantime, we’ll keep masking.

A week or two ago, your dad had just finished putting lotion on you before bed. He was kneeling right at eye level with you, and he hugged you and told you how much he loves you. I was standing nearby, touched by the sweet scene, but I could tell you had something on your mind. You wiggled out of his grip, not exactly trying to get away from him, but  making some space for yourself so you could say what you were thinking. “I just love darn wings,” you said.  Then you started describing your ideal chicken wing, which would be a long bone that you could hold with one hand on each end and a huge ball of meat in the middle.

You’ve been into chicken wings lately.

Your current favorites: Wild Kratts, telling me animal facts you learned on Wild Kratts, setting timers on our Google Home to remind you when to stop watching Wild Kratts on your recess break and return to class, pizza, waffles, toast, chicken wings, playing outside, and bedtimes stories (especially The Man Who Walked Between the Towers and the Magic Treehouse series). We often share the job of reading, alternating pages or chunks. That’s particularly useful in The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, because the illustrations are so evocative that they trigger my acrophobia. The downside of how well you can read is that I cannot get away with skipping paragraphs in the more boring books. Sometimes bedtime gets long. That’s okay, though. Time with you is never time wasted, even if I wish you’d shake up your reading preferences rather than choosing the same books over and over.

I’m so excited to have some time away with you, Callum. We’ve been talking about it for so long now, and more recently packing and preparing, and I’m so glad we’ve almost made it. Every day with you is special, but vacation time with you is the most special of all.

Love,

Mommy

Dear Artemis,

I have to say, you have been a very agreeable person lately. You still choose to spend most of your time at home ensconced in your room, but when you do join us, you’re funny and friendly. You and Callum have been playing together a lot, making weapons out of cardboard and balloons and other household items. You then battle one another, and I remain in favor of the activity because no one has gotten hurt yet. You even made a video of your matches, complete with edits for time (which I as a viewer appreciated) and sound effects. You and Tobin still get into it a fair amount, which seems to bother your dad and me more than it bothers either of you. Tobin has stayed home from school the last couple of days due to a cold, so he’s been sleeping in. I’ve enjoyed chatting with you at the breakfast bar, just the two of us, before school.

The biggest every-other-Spring-Break event for our family is coming up in just a few days: our Florida Keys trip. We’ve all managed to stay Covid-free, though I had about 36 hours of terror before we got Tobin’s test results back. I did buy trip insurance so we could reschedule if someone got Covid, but I was really, really hoping not to have to use it. We’re doing our best not to let the cold work its way through the whole family, though that may be a futile effort. Callum started complaining of a sore throat today, and your dad and I are both on a constant paranoid search for symptoms in ourselves. So far you seem not to have gotten it, probably due to your preference for staying in your room all the time. I hope it’s not too bad for anyone and we can all have some fun and relaxation. Last time, we could barely drag you out of the pool, which was good because it was at the very beginning of the pandemic, and we hardly left the condo at all. This time, armed with masks and vaccines and very low Covid rates at both our home and our destination, we hope to do a few more cultural and nature-related adventures in the area. I’m sure my next monthly letter will be mostly pictures from that trip.

After Spring Break, you’ll only have a couple of months left as a junior high student. Your seventh-grade year was so weird it hardly counts, and this year seems to have gone even faster. It’s hard to fathom that you’ll be a high school student soon, but you signed up for classes, so I guess that’s good evidence. Your eighth grade year has gone very well, as far as I can tell. You finished your second trimester with straight-As, continued to develop good friendships and went to some birthday parties, and seem to be generally enjoying your life. Even though our school district ended its mask mandate, you tell me that most people still choose to wear masks in school. You know how important it is to me that you continue to wear yours, and I am glad that you haven’t made a stink about it. I wish you didn’t sit next to a non-masker in band, but we can’t control what others do.

We’ve started thinking about what the summer will look like. Technically you’ve aged out of your favorite animation camp. At the showcase after last summer’s camp, I was thanking your teacher for all the good times and expressing that it was a bummer that you’d completed your last year. The teacher insisted that you were welcome as long as you wanted to come, and that the age limit shouldn’t stop you. For that reason, you decided to sign up again this summer. It might start getting awkward if you’re a lot older than the other students, but maybe you could be an assistant teacher down the road. One conflict that emerged is band camp, but as a freshman, you only have to attend the last two days. I figure you’ve learned enough animation by now that it won’t be a huge problem to miss a small chunk of the camp. Mostly what I care about is that you’re doing something fun and interesting, and both animation camp and band camp fit that description.

You needed some new shirts, so I bought you some, and I fear my days of shopping for you in the children’s section are over. All your shirts look too short in the arms. Your brace exacerbates this effect, and you only wear that during your at-home hours, so hopefully during the school day you don’t suffer too badly from cold wrists. It took me a while to come to terms with the idea of buying shoes for you from the adult section, and I’m not too crazy about the clothing side of the equation either. It will be tricky to find pants that are both long enough and skinny enough for you. I bought you a few new pairs of shorts for our trip, and it’s a very good thing they had real drawstrings. It is very frustrating how many shorts and swim trunks have purely decorative drawstrings at the waist, and since I do most of my shopping online, it can be hard to know before the package arrives. What kind of nonsense is that?

This will be our first flight involving your back brace, and it will be interesting to see how that works. I know we’re allowed to carry it on with us without it counting against our carry-on allotment, so we’ll probably do that. It seems safer than checking it, considering the way checked baggage gets tossed around. I don’t think you’d want to wear it during the flight, since you find it uncomfortable to be seated for very long while wearing it. There’s also the question of physical therapy, which involves a few accessories of different sizes. I asked your therapist about it at our last appointment, and she said it was fine to just do a modified version of PT during our vacation. I think we’ll bring the exercise band and skip the inflatable ball and tension straps. I don’t think it’s smart to skip PT entirely, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate having a week-long reduction in intensity. Swimming is great exercise for scoliosis patients too, so if you spend as much time in the pool as you have on previous trips, I think we can consider it an overall spinal success.

Your current favorites: watching Psych with your dad and Tobin, pasta, chatting online with your friends, Mario Maker, changing your clothes, making weird expressions when I try to take your picture, walking to and from school with your friends, and everything in the Pixar universe. There’s a new Pixar movie coming out soon, and I hope it’s available immediately on Disney+. It would be fun to watch it together during our vacation. The pandemic has been mostly awful, of course, but one positive outcome has been the wider availability of movies on streaming services. It’s fun to go to the movies, sure, but it’s quite expensive if we’re taking the whole family, and it’s not as much fun if you (I) don’t feel comfortable taking of your (my) mask to eat popcorn. The TV room works well for me.

My dear child, thank you for being such a cool person. Even if not all your choices are exactly the same ones I would make, I know and trust that you are a smart, good-hearted, creative human being. I am grateful for your resilience and dependability. I’m so glad you’re in our family.

Love,

Mom