My dear Artie-heart,

Fall chugs along, and we’re at the midterm point of your first trimester of high school. As far as I can tell, things seem to be going well at school. Your grades are excellent, you seem to have friends who care about you, and you’ve been enjoying the band community. A couple of weeks ago, you marched with your fellow marching band members in the homecoming parade. I was half a parade away, helping wrangle kids from your little brothers’ elementary school as they marched in the parade, but I smiled every time I heard you playing “Eye of the Tiger” in the distance. It seems like a generationally irrelevant song choice, since I’m barely old enough to remember the movie Rocky, but it remains a hit with the marching band.

You’ll start jazz band in a few weeks. I hope you find that enjoyable and fulfilling. I was hoping you’d get involved in some other activities, like speech or maybe robotics club, but for the time being you seem happy as a band geek. You even said that the stadium cleanups aren’t so bad. Your school band gets a big donation from the university in exchange for showing up on the morning after a Hawkeye football game and cleaning up the mess left in the stadium parking lots by attendees. I thought I’d have to drag you against your will to those sessions, but the prospect of hanging out with friends and doughnut holes afterward seems to be motivation enough.

Our school district gives students a short fall break, which took place last week. We took advantage of the days off to go to St. Louis. It was technically Tobin’s Eleven trip. We have established a family tradition of taking a special trip when a kid turns eleven. It started with you, when we went to Universal Orlando shortly after your eleventh birthday. We picked that because Universal features Harry Potter World, and Harry Potter got his invitation to Hogwarts on his eleventh birthday. Tobin is quick to point out that St. Louis is much less exotic than Universal Orlando, and I am quick to point out that he didn’t really suffer any disadvantage, since he got to go on both trips.

Anyway, we all had fun in St. Louis. It’s a reasonable drive from our house, and we rented a townhouse in our favorite St. Louis neighborhood. It was near a nice park, restaurants with outdoor seating, and a good ice cream place. It was also less than a ten-minute drive from the attractions we wanted to visit, including the City Museum, the St. Louis Zoo, and the Gateway Arch.  You said the City Museum was your favorite of the places we went. You declined to go up into the arch with the rest of the family. You’re both old enough and trustworthy enough to handle chilling in the museum while we did the arch ascent and descent, so it worked out fine.

Your general attitude has been pretty good lately. I frequently find myself heart-warmed by watching you interact with Callum. He’s been in a big badminton phase lately, and even though your default position is sprawled on your bed, I often look out the window and see you batting the birdie around with him. The other night, you spent multiple hours teaching him how to code a computer game on a simple gaming platform. You and your dad have been watching a show together, and he was going to invite you to watch an episode, but you and Callum were so immersed in your coding project that he held off. You and Callum finished it last night, and he was so, so proud to show it off to your dad and me. I could tell you were proud of him and tickled about how excited he was. The game is pretty fun. The player has to deflect arrows and make them pop a big balloon before the arrows land on the game characters. I enjoyed playing it, but most of all I enjoyed seeing your two smiling faces as you displayed your work.

We had assumed you would be getting braces soon, because your dentist referred you to an local private orthodontist. We later learned that we could get free orthodontic care for you through the College of Dentistry due to your dad’s job, so we switched you to that clinic. You had a few evaluative appointments, and at the last one, they basically said that braces are optional for you. You don’t have any serious dental alignment issues, so the treatment would be mostly cosmetic. Frankly, your teeth are pretty nice-looking. The orthodontist also said that one reason Invisalign is so popular with adults is that very few people wear their retainers long enough or consistently enough to maintain their results long-term. We know your brothers are both going to need braces, so right now we’re leaning toward skipping it with you. You do such a good job wearing your scoliosis brace as prescribed, it seems like it would be nice to let you not do mouth braces. You have a lovely smile.

Your current favorites: pasta, cream soda, sleeping late, making witty rejoinders, being a goofball, watching YouTube videos, and wearing exclusively comfortable clothing. You’ve taken a stand against jeans, preferring sweatpants or pajama pants. I think your least favorite part of marching band is the uniform. I don’t know yet what you’ll wear for jazz band performances, but I suspect the lower half might be something that does not have an elastic waistband.

I’ve had a fun fall with you so far, my sweet pup. Enjoy the few remaining beautiful days we have left.

Love,

Mom