Dear Callum,

This has been a summer of friendship for you. We signed you up for baseball, your first sport ever and your first group activity since pre-Covid. You team was kind of terrible, but you never let it bring you down. You focused on the message that it was for fun and learning, and with the exception of one rude kid who smack-talked, it was a good experience. Your favorite parts were the post-game snacks. Even when it was beastly hot out, you always wanted to stay for Tobin’s game after yours. This was partly because you were likely to get more snacks, but mostly because you became good friends with other little brothers. One was the younger brother of Tobin’s teammate, so he was often there, and you also reconnected with a preschool friend whose older brother usually played at the same time as Tobin’s team.

Even though I was very happy that you had such a good year of online school, I was concerned about your social readiness for in-person school this fall. Seeing how well you jumped in and played with those other kids made me feel more confident. I know you’ll be fine academically, so as long as you can sort out how to listen to your teacher and follow classroom community rules, I think you’ll have a good year.

We had been a bit concerned that you might have a first-year teacher, because there’s been a lot of staff turnover at our elementary school. Right now the district roster shows two experienced teachers whom our family knows as teaching both the second grade sections, so I hope that’s a final decision. Either one of them would be a good teacher for you. I really just wanted someone who has been through years of teaching and has seen a lot of different situations to help support you as you go to in-person school for the first time in a long time.

It’s certainly going to be different with all three of you kids away from home all day. Maybe I’ll write another book or do more simulated patient jobs, or maybe I’ll just sit around and cry. Hopefully I will get that out of my system in the first few days and then find other things to do. I do know that I will be counting down the hours until pick-up time on that first day of school. Covid is a concern, of course, but we plan to get you and Tobin boosters before school starts. Unfortunately they won’t be the omicron-specific boosters that will be available to adults later this year, but any kind of medical reassurance is welcome. We’ll make sure you and your siblings continue to mask at school, though I’m not sure how that will work at lunch. Last year I brought Tobin home during high-Covid-rate times, but I don’t know if it will be practical or reasonable to do that at two different lunch times every day.

We’ll have to see how things are going and make a decision as the date draws nearer. I imagine Covid will hit our family eventually. In fact we had a scare earlier this week after our trip to Innsbrook. You had a positive test result that turned out to be a false positive. I was very freaked out, because we have a lot of important things going on in July that are hard to reschedule. I think something may have gone wrong at the lab, because your dad knows someone else who got a false positive just one day after you. We put all the safety protocols in place and were hoping for the best, so it was a huge relief to find out you weren’t actually sick. We will almost certainly get it at some point—school is a cesspool of germs, but it’s also a font of development, so it really seems like time to get you back. We can just hope that advances in vaccines continue and that any cases we get are mild and conveniently timed. I know there’s no truly convenient time to be sick, but I would prefer any time that doesn’t concur with my book tour, family visits, and your sibling’s surgery.

The family visit to which I referred was a trip to Innsbrook, Missouri. We rented a house on a lake with Mubby, Skitter, and Uncle Tyler’s family. You and cousin Vera became immediate best friends. You relaxed in the hot tub, played video games, watched movies, ate treats, played foosball and darts, swam in the pool, and had an epic water fight. It made me happy to see you have so much fun together. You both know what it’s like to be the little sibling who gets dragged to older siblings’ events and practices. You’re good at finding friends among the kids who are around.

We don’t have another vacation planned right now, which always makes me antsy. Tobin was hoping to take a trip to celebrate turning eleven, but our July has gotten so busy that we’ve hardly had time to think about it. Everything’s more complicated these days, and it’s hard to make plans too far in advance when you don’t know what the Covid climate will be like or what kind of nonsense will be happening with airports. I recently learned that the US no longer requires a negative Covid test to get into the country. That hardly seems like a smart strategy, and it doesn’t make me more likely to get on an international flight any time soon. I do hope we can get another trip figured out, because vacation time with my family is the very best time of all. I want you to have the kinds of family vacation memories that I have.

Your current favorites: corn on the cob, sugary beverages like Kool-Aid, Minecraft, playing with your siblings, doing physical therapy with Artemis, having play swordfights with Tobin, bouncing around on Artemis’s physical therapy ball, crafting weapons out of toys that were never supposed to be weapons, reading The Magic Tree House books at bedtime, and wearing jaunty hats.

You’re a sweet little guy, and I hope the American public school system doesn’t squash that out of you. In the meantime, we still have a good chunk of summer left, and I’m going to hug and kiss and squash you in the most loving way I can while you’ll still let me.

Love,

Mommy