My dear Tobin,

Fifth grade has begun, and you’re doing just as well as I knew you would. We had a back to school night last week, and it was great to talk to your teacher about how it’s all going. She’s a newer teacher to your school, one I didn’t know at all before you were assigned to her classroom. You seem to like her a lot, and she seems to like you a lot too. What she told me about your work and behavior in her class didn’t surprise me: you’re smart, confident, quick to volunteer to answer a question or do work on the board. She also mentioned that you can be chatty, which also wasn’t surprising. The family joke is that you started talking at age one and haven’t stopped since. Although your best friend is in the other class, you still have plenty of good friends with you, and you are never low on conversation topics.

One thing she mentioned really impressed me: after you and your friends got a bit of a scolding for being overly talkative, you approached her, apologized, and said you would work on doing better. She also said that after that you really did cut back on the talking. That’s exactly the kind of person I want you to be. No one’s behavior is perfect, but the ability to acknowledge mistakes and work to improve is the mark of someone who will succeed.

You celebrated your eleventh birthday with friends a little late, since your best friend had COVID around the time of your originally-scheduled party. We were keeping the group small, so we pushed it to the next weekend in order to make sure it was a safe situation for everyone. You jumped at the trampoline park, kindly including Callum in the mayhem, and then gathered in our backyard for pizza and cupcakes.

You’ve chosen St. Louis as the destination for your Eleven Trip. It’s not quite as glamorous as Universal Orlando, which was Artemis’s special trip, but we’re also able to stay a bit longer. You have a mini fall break from school next week, so after your Saturday morning soccer game, we’ll head southward on the Avenue of the Saints. St. Louis is a reasonable road trip from our home, and it’s full of fun stuff to do. We’re planning to hit the City Museum again, this time getting rooftop passes. We’ve been there a couple of times but never sprung for the rooftop before, and now seemed like the perfect time to do it. It will make it a little bit more eleventh-birthay special, plus the more we can do it open air the better. We’re also planning to visit the zoo and spend time in Lafayette Square park, one of our favorite places in the city. It also happens to be near Clementine’s Naughty and Nice ice cream, which is another destination high on our list.

As a kid who loves ritual and tradition, you’ve been very interested in sorting out the details for the trip. You like to look at vacation rentals with me, both the one we’ve actually reserved and other ones for vacations that are still in the fantasy stage. We’ve been talking about trips to Spain and Italy for years. We haven’t yet put any of those plans into action, but I really hope we can one day. You’d be a good European travel partner, I know, because you’d be good at walking around a lot, and you get really interested and excited about topics. There’s plenty we could research in advance of a big trip like that.

You’re also very invested in our smaller-scale rituals and traditions, like our annual apple-picking trip to Wilson’s Orchard. While Wilson’s has expanded their agricultural offers to include pick-your-own strawberries, sunflowers, and Christmas trees, I appreciate that it hasn’t turned into a theme park. It seems like a lot of orchards do that, and tons of people seem to enjoy them, but I really appreciate the experience of wandering among rows of apple trees and finding good specimens. We were a little late to Honeycrisp season this year, and we had to walk pretty far into the orchard to find trees that still had good fruit on them, but our perseverance paid off. We got several buckets of apples, and of course we didn’t skip the apple cider doughnuts and locally-produced cider. Apple-picking is probably your favorite of our reasons to go to Wilson’s, because the early fall weather is perfect for a leisurely stroll, and apple-picking doesn’t rely much on being able to see the color red. Strawberry picking is a little frustrating for a kid with red color blindness.

Soccer has been a new thing for you this fall, and you’ve really been loving it. You were assigned to a team with a few people you knew, and of course you’re becoming friends with the ones you didn’t yet know. We’re carpooling with another family, the mom of which is a friend of mine. You didn’t know her son before this soccer team assignment, but you two seem to have hit it off. It’s a decent drive out to the soccer fields, and you two have all kinds of interesting conversations about space, gravity, the multi-verse theory, and strategies on how to be really good at Simon Says.

You’ve been playing goalie a fair amount, and to my untrained eye, you’re doing a great job. At the last game, your team won 3-0, and not because the other team was never in a position to score. You didn’t let a ball get by you. I hope you get to try out other positions, too, because you seem to really be catching on. I was afraid you might need some time to figure out the rules, but it hasn’t been a problem. You jumped right in and are a valuable member of the team.

Photo by Gary Clarke

Your current favorites: soccer, playing with your friends both online and in person, reading (especially books by Stuart Gibbs), helping make stir-fry, singing “fry, fry, fry, fry, stirrin’ the fry, stirrin’ the fry” to the tune of “Stayin’ Alive” while you make stir-fry, alternating between your two favorite grey t-shirts, and generally being a part of things. You told me recently that you don’t like non-team sports. I think that’s because you have the most fun when you’re surrounded by friends. That’s convenient, because you can hardly avoid making friends in any group you encounter.

I’m so glad you’re able to have a reasonably normal school year. Most people in your school don’t wear masks, but I still ask that you and your siblings do. I know it’s not your favorite thing to do, but you’re a good kid and you don’t complain about it. We’ve talked about how it’s foolish to live as if the pandemic is completely over, but with some compromises and strategies, we can still do a lot of really fun things.

Every day with you in it is fun, Tobin. Enjoy your Eleven Trip and all the great things that come with being a fifth-grade dynamo.

Love,

Mom