Dear Miles,

I feel like all my pictures of you lately are blurry or awkward, because you don’t spend much time lately gazing adorably at a camera for me. It’s a good thing I took tons of pictures of you during your baby years, because now all you do is making a weird face or run away when I try to take a photo.

You’re not entirely antisocial, though. I’ve noticed you finding opportunities to come talk to me, often about things in which I have to feign interest.  There’s a theory propagated by some YouTube you like that all the Pixar movies take place in the same universe, which is similar to but not the same as our own.  Apparently it all started in The Good Dinosaur when a comet nearly hit the Earth but didn’t quite.  You love to discuss it, and about all I can contribute to that conversation is that I enjoyed Coco. Still, I like the fact that you want to chat.

I try to cherish those moments, because most of the time you prefer to be holed up in your room, reading or playing an online game with your friends or watching YouTubers talk about Pixar theories. I mostly leave you alone when you’re in there, partly because I think you deserve privacy, and also because I’m so busy keeping your brothers on track with their online school and doing my own work.

I thought you were sailing along just fine without much intervention from your dad or me, but then it turned out you had missed some important skills and not correctly submitted some homework assignments in your classes.  I don’t envy your position. The kind of time management and organization required to keep up with all-online school is something I didn’t have to learn until college, and then it was only four or five classes at a time.  You have a full schedule of eight classes, and not all the teachers post assignments and deadlines the same way. Some of them do it in a such a way that it populates the calendar view on the learning management system the school uses, but others post it elsewhere on their websites, and it can be really hard to keep track. I spent forty minutes the other night just sorting out what you have due Sunday night.

I hope you’re able to find some organizational strategies that work for you, because I would hate for you to not do well in school because you haven’t developed a skillset unrelated to the actual coursework. As someone who worked in instructional technology, I’m quick to recognize when teachers are making choices that add a lot of unnecessary obfuscation to the task. That’s frustrating, but it’s also frustrating to see you not take much initiative. You always tell me you have all your work done when you don’t, and you tell me you understand concepts when you don’t. Your dad and I clearly need to probe deeper, and that might mean Tobin and Callum will have to be on their own more than they have been.  It’s a balance we need to find, and we’re working on it. We’ll keep at it together.

As much as you would prefer to be a hermit in your room your whole life, we’ve coerced you into the outdoors as much as we can. We don’t have a lot of this beautiful fall weather left, so we need to enjoy it. We spend the afternoon yesterday at a state park with Nana and Papa, and it was good to see them. It’s going to be hard when the weather turns cold and we can’t have outdoor get-togethers with people anymore. That’s been our only means of socializing, and it doesn’t look like COVID cases will be dropping in our area any time soon.  It doesn’t seem to bother you much, since your preferred method of socializing is texting and video chatting anyway, but I still like hauling you out of your room now and then.

We’ve taken a few nice walks together lately, and I can sometimes steal a blurry picture of you before you hide your head in your hands.

Your current favorites: pasta with homemade tomato sauce, Honey Nut Cheerios, the Artemis Fowl books and the spinoff, the Fowl Twins (but not the movie, you are quick to point out), the online game Among Us, your science class, your Family and Consumer Sciences class, making troll levels in Mario Maker, and performing basic hygiene only when I prod you about it.

For the moment, you are not planning to trick or treat. Probably none of us will; we’re planning a neighborhood candy hunt in the park. You still have an idea for a costume, and I am still super-psyched to help you make it. I’m glad you still take joy in creativity and weirdness, and I hope you know  I’m here to support you in the fun stuff and the boring stuff (I’m looking at you, pre-algebra).

Love,

Mom