Dear Tobin,

A month ago, you were at the very end of your fourth-grade year. All-in-all it was a great success. You did well academically, reconnected with old friends, got to know some new friends, and seemed very happy overall. While I would love to keep you close to me at all times, I recognize that you really thrive in a social environment. I’m happy you had such a great second half of your fourth grade year. You weren’t in the same class as your best friend, which bummed you out at first, but you got to know other kids and made some good connections. Fifth grade will be coming soon, but for the moment, you’re relishing your break.

Summer is here, your favorite time of the year. The first couple of weeks were a little bit of a challenge, because you are someone who always wants to be active and busy, and it was an adjustment to live life at a slower pace. We’ve already burned through at least half of our summer activity list. Highlights include strawberry picking at Wilson’s, going to discount second-run movies, picnics downtown with food from Z’Marik’s, walking and biking around on our neighborhood multi-purpose path, getting frozen yogurt, and playing a lot of baseball. You’ve been hanging out with your old summer gang, the Screwdrivers, biking around and jumping on their trampoline. I’m glad you reconnected with them, because I was getting worn out trying to provide you with all the stimulation you need. It’s nice that you have good friends nearby who can absorb some of your social energy.

Your baseball team has been excellent this year. You finished the season with a 14-0 record, and the tournament begins this week. You’ve never played fall baseball before, but you’re talking about doing it this year. Your usual fall and winter sport is taekwondo, but I must say I prefer the outdoor focus of baseball. It’s not always comfortable—there have been some miserably cold and miserably hot nights at the baseball diamond this season—but I am glad for you to have a lower risk of COVID exposure. Even though the sources say rates are dropping in our area, I feel like I know as many people with COVID right now as I did during last winter’s surge. Fortunately, people don’t seem to be getting seriously ill, but it still has the potential to throw a wrench in our plans. We have a lot going on in July, and I would hate to see our plans get ruined.

You’re eligible for a booster vaccine, which I think we’ll get for you a couple of weeks before school starts. It’s the old version of the vaccine, which doesn’t do a whole lot against symptomatic omicron variants, but it would bolster you against serious illness. Rumor has it Moderna has a new vaccine coming soon that will address omicron, but it will likely be only for people eighteen and up. I understand why the testing and approval processes work that way, but it’s still frustrating for those of us who want to protect our kids with all the tools available.

You are trustworthy about wearing your mask for all indoor time and even outdoors if it’s crowded. I appreciate that you do such a good job with that. As you are such a friendship-driven person, I could see you being susceptible to peer pressure about that kind of thing. A lot of people have quit masking entirely, even people who have been generally cautious throughout the pandemic. Maybe that’s why I know so maybe people with COVID right now. I’m guessing it will hit our family at some point, because even though we do our best to take precautions, we also don’t want to eliminate all fun from our lives. We go to movies and school and play with friends, and masks are great but not perfect. I just hope vaccines and our generally-healthy status keeps it from being too bad.

You love staying busy with a project. A while ago, I bought a little rhubarb plant at the Farmers’ Market and planted it in our garden. The next day, half of it was gone. I did a little reading and learned that deer are known to take out entire rhubarb plants, and deer are frequent visitors to our yard. If I’d been smarter I would have put it inside the electric fence, but I didn’t realize it was such deer bait. Because ours was not entirely gone but lid with zip ties. I found that useful when I weeded around the rhubarb the other day. It’s staging a comeback, and maybe I’ll even get you to eat some rhubarb barbs if it ever gets big enough to harvest.

You don’t have a particularly broad palate just yet, but you do like to be adventurous. You’re my kid most likely to try a new food, even if you don’t end up liking it. I appreciate that about you, because it increases the odds of you getting something resembling a balanced diet. You also like helping me cook, which I think gives you an incentive to try the foods we make. You did a great job chopping herbs the other night with a big knife. Everyone’s fingers remained intact, and the herbs ended up thoroughly minced.

Your current favorites: baseball, Star Wars, biking and trampolining with your friends, the fact that the Warriors won the NBA championship, listening to audiobooks, hanging out on the balcony, premium vanilla ice cream, making your opinion known about what we should get for take-out night, playing Minecraft with your friends, and playing basketball at the park.

Every day is more exciting with you in it, my little adventure boy. I love your blue eyes, your freckles, your zest for life, and your willingness to be part of a team: baseball, friend group, and family. We can always count on you to bring laughter to any situation, and I’m so glad you’re mine.

Love,

Mom

Dear Callum,

You have now completed first grade, which we anticipate will be the end of your online education. Of course I can’t say for sure; not much over the last couple of years has worked exactly the way our family expected it to. Your online school experience was mostly good, especially first grade. Your teacher was truly excellent, so good that we decided to keep you in her online class even after you were vaccinated. But it will be good for you to be in a traditional class with lots of other kids. I haven’t been too worried about your socialization, since your brothers keep you busy with negotiations of all sorts, but it’s not quite the same as a group of kids your own age.

There’s talk of our school system reorganizing; right now, kindergarten through sixth grade are elementary school, and seventh and eighth grades are junior high. The plan is to change to a middle school model with sixth, seventh, and eighth grades in the same buildings. It’s unclear exactly when that change will happen, but it’s possible that you and Tobin will only have one year together at the same elementary school.

You’ve been having fun playing baseball, even though your skills aren’t very strong yet. At your level, the emphasis is still on having fun and learning. That’s good because it’s your first time on a sports team, and you really haven’t had much practice at all. I’m hoping it’s taught you some of the basics you’ll need for school, like how to line up and how to hustle in when the coach (teacher) calls you. You strike out a lot, and you sometimes sit down or spin around in circles while fielding, but you’re good-natured about it. You always say you had a good time at the end of the game. You really enjoy the snacks. You also have a lot of fun playing with the younger brother of a teammate of Tobin’s, and since he’s usually around during Tobin’s games, that’s offered you another good socialization opportunity.

We’ve been keeping busy throughout these first couple of weeks of summer. We’ve gone downtown, to the movies, strawberry picking, out for ice cream and flavor ice, checked out library books, and had relaxing time around the house. You’ve been into a variety of video games, and sometimes you beat your siblings when you play together. You can guess which one of them is usually gracious and which one throws the remote.

We’ve been able to get outside more often because the worst of allergy season has passed for you. The rest of us are all getting running noses and itchy throats, but your swollen eyes have abated. You have an appointment with the allergist next month, and I suspect they’ll recommend a full panel of allergy tests. We were hoping to get into the program at a different clinic (all part of the same hospital system) that offers sublingual drops, but that’s not where the appointment we finally got will occur. I’ll ask them about it when we’re there. I don’t want to put you through the pain and stress of allergy shots for an issue that only bothers you a few weeks a year, but it bothers you so much during those several weeks that we need step up our protocol somehow. I guess they’ll give us advice then. For now, it’s nice to let you play outside without knowing it will result in suffering.

You still love to craft and create. I bought you a fort-making kit for some birthday or holiday, and you liked it fine, but what you like most is repurposing the sticks. You make arrows out of them to shoot with your bow and arrow sets (both the commercial one and the one you made out of a bent stick and elastic from my craft supplies), tools for playing bop the balloon, various swords and shields, and some things I can’t identify but that involve a lot of masking tape. You’re hard to buy gifts for, because you’re not really into toys exactly, and people don’t seem to want to buy rolls of tape and sticks for children. You also like sticks from trees, and we have an ever-growing pile of them on our front step. Sometimes you wrap those in tape too.

You’re funny, silly, quick to laugh and always ready to join in on a conversation. You like telling jokes and doing magic tricks. You enjoy wearing hats.

Your current favorites: cocktail hour on the balcony, the video games Arms and Cookie Counter, Minecraft, YouTube videos of other people playing Minecraft, the Magic Treehouse and Nate the Great book series, following along with Artemis’s physical therapy exercises, bouncing on the exercise ball even when not doing physical therapy, meat of all sorts, and frozen pizza.

You’re a hoot, and I’m so happy I get to spend the summer with you. It’s going to be tough to let you go in the fall, because we’ve spent so much time together over the last few years, but you’re brave and smart and ready for new challenges.

In the meantime, we’re going to have a great summer. I love you so much.

Love,

Mommy

Dear Artemis,

This month, you completed your time as a junior high student. Because our school district only has seventh and eighth grades in the junior high, and you spent your seventh grade year doing online learning, you really only had one year of the true junior high experience. It was a good year, though. You’ve made some good friends (all of whom now use names and pronouns I wasn’t expecting), got excellent grades (straight-As with some A-pluses as well), and grew several inches.

You had an appointment yesterday in Orthopedics to assess the state of your scoliosis. A growth spurt is a time when curves often get worse, so we were relieved to learn that the your curve is holding steady at 21%. You are very responsible about wearing your brace and doing your physical therapy exercises, and it’s great to see your hard work paying off. A 21% curve is absolutely livable and not something that would require surgery. One item of note is that you are nowhere near the end of your growth. You probably have several more inches of height yet to achieve, and as long as you continue your good brace use until your growth is complete, you should be just fine. You’re already taller than me, and I’m working on accepting that fact emotionally.

As far as I can tell, you don’t seem too freaked out about starting high school. You’ll have band camp for a few days in early August, which will give you a chance to check things out, but you never got any kind of formal orientation. I remember going to the high school as an eighth grader and walking through an abbreviated version of my schedule and meeting my teachers. I haven’t seen anything like that planned for you, but maybe it happens later in the summer. Your high school is big and has a lot to offer, but I could also see it being overwhelming.

I don’t know if you feel more anxiety than you express, but from the outside, you seem pretty chill about everything. You have your occasional emotional fluctuations, which is to be expected at this life stage and as part of the general human experience, but mostly you’re even-keeled. The biggest smiles I’ve seen from you lately are when I give you updates about my recent book publication. I feel like you’re one of the people who’s most proud of me, and there is truly no greater honor than to have my teenage kid be proud of me.

We were hoping to get your parotid tumor surgery completed early in the summer in order to give you as much healing time as possible before you were expected to play a trombone. Unfortunately, scheduling that has been a big source of frustration. Your surgeon wants to do the surgery in the main hospital operating room, because the nursing staff there are more experienced and better trained in this type of surgery. Apparently the kind of tumor you have (benign, for anyone new readers) is more common in adults than children or teenagers, so your surgeon is concerned that the nursing staff at the Children’s Hospital won’t be as well-equipped to assist him. At your pre-surgery consultation, the surgeon noted that the tumor is small and asymptomatic. It was only discovered incidentally during an MRI for scoliosis. He said that it could have been ten years before it grew big enough to be noticeable. In ten years, you will be an adult, and there would be no question about which operating room to use. So maybe it’s not really the case that the tumor is more common in adults, but rather that it rises to the level of being problematic more often in adults. Maybe there are tons of teenagers running around with tumors in their parotid glands and they won’t realize it until adulthood.

In any case, right now we’re waiting to hear whether the surgeon’s request to work on you in the main hospital will be granted, and that will give us our final answer on your surgery date. At the moment, his request has been denied, but the scheduler told me he was going to have a face-to-face meeting with the Chief of Surgery to plead his case. If he succeeds, your surgery will be July 20. If he doesn’t, it’s back to the drawing board for scheduling. I don’t think this surgery has an enormously challenging recovery period, but still, I want you to feel fully up-to-snuff before you have to march around a football field playing a trombone. Another possibility is nerve damage, since a major facial nerve runs through the parotid gland. They’ll do their best to avoid it, but it’s a potential complication. The good news is that it’s usually not permanent, but it could make trombone-playing difficult. At least you’ll wear a mask to school, so any facial weakness or drooping won’t be too obvious.

Photo by Gary Clarke

You served as Dungeon Master for the first time playing Dungeons & Dragons with a group of friends, and you seem to have really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, you haven’t been able to get the group together for another session, because no one’s summer schedule seems to coincide. It’s a shame, because it’s a funny hobby and a nice group of kids. Hopefully you’ll find a time soon. I remember Dungeons & Dragons being controversial when I was a kid, with Reagan-era moralizers clutching their pearls about how it would surely lead to Satanism. I’m glad that moral panic has waned. I think of it as a pretty wholesome way to spend time, having imaginary adventures with friends.

I’ve been thinking about the pandemic and how we are creeping back toward a normal life. I am completely fine with some concessions—wearing a high-quality mask when indoors is no big deal to me, and you and your siblings seem fine doing it at school. I fear that a lot of people, in their pandemic fatigue, are taking unnecessary risks. I took you and your brothers to a movie yesterday, and we picked one that was not a new release and at a time when it was unlikely to be crowded. We wore masks the whole time and, instead of getting snacks from the theater, we stopped by McDonald’s afterward and got McFlurries to go. Is that such a sacrifice? I don’t understand it when people refuse to do the smallest things to protect themselves and others. There are so many wonderful, fun things we still get to do, and I’m grateful that you and your brothers maintain good attitudes about taking some measures of civic and personal responsibility.

Your current favorites: Mario Maker; pasta; ice cream; Doritos; root beer; sleeping late; telling jokes; playing Wordle with Mubby, Aunt Suzy, and me; avoiding all exercise and outdoor experiences; and making silly faces when I try to take your picture. More often, lately, you’ve been giving genuine smiles. Your smile makes me smile.

I love you, my tall and still-growing child. Not every step of this life is easy, but you are handling the challenges you face with aplomb. Keep up the great work.

Love,

Mom