Dear Callum,

These are some important days for you. At the end of this week, you’ll be finishing up what I hope is your last time as an online student. You had an excellent experience with a wonderful teacher this year. When we chose to change your enrollment to in-person, it had not yet been determined which teachers would keep teaching online and which would go back to their home schools. We gambled on the wonderful Mrs. Davis being reassigned to her physical elementary school, which is not the one you and Tobin will attend. As it turns out, she’s going to continue teaching online. That’s a bummer, because if we’d known that, we might not have made the same decision. However, it’s not a bad thing for you to go back to school in-person. Your future teacher is brand new to the school (and, I suspect, to teaching). We did a Zoom with her and your future classmates this morning, and she seemed kind. She also volunteered to come to our house tomorrow to get to know you better, so I hope that works out. There’s a windstorm in the forecast, and I’m still a little emotionally damaged from the derecho of 2020. I certainly hope it isn’t that bad, but I’m already formulating a plan. It involves hanging out in the basement and putting food in coolers.

You’ve had a little bit of nervousness about changing to in-person school, particularly because you’ll miss your teacher (and your best friend from your online class, John Farmer). You seemed to enjoy talking to your new teacher today, though, and you’ll probably adjust quickly.

One thing about you lately is that you get quite emotional about things, but you get over it pretty quickly. It seems like every night you cry about something. I imagine that’s due to being tired—everything always seems worse when a person is tired. Your sources of your sadness range from the reasonable (leaving Mrs. Davis’s class) to the moderate (the destruction of a house you built in Minecraft) to the absurd (Scaredy Squirrel in the eponymous bedtime story was scared of a bee rather than appreciating its usefulness). You also cried when you found out Leonardo da Vinci died. I assured you that he lived to be very, very old and accomplished thousands of wonderful things in his life. Later we found out he only lived to be 67, so that didn’t help.

You’ve been doing all kinds of different projects lately, both school-based and of your own invention. We have a family rule that you don’t do screen time before 3:00 p.m., which usually leaves you with an hour or more to fill after your last school Zoom. You get up to all kinds of creative endeavors. Today you made a wand with the letter E on it, and you wrote words that change with the magic of a “Super E.” You and Tobin get into all kinds of loud and wild Pokémon battles. I don’t understand the details of them, but there’s a lot of shouting. Now and then it ends with someone getting upset, but usually it’s a pretty fun way for you two to play together.

The freedom and flexibility of online school have let you explore your own interests, and I hope getting back to a traditional school environment doesn’t stifle that too much. You’ll also face the challenge of dealing with classmates’ behavior issues. Right now, if a student is being disruptive, your teacher can just mute him or her and move on with the rest of class. That isn’t so easy in person. But your school has a wide variety of students with a wide variety of needs, and I guess it’s good for you to gain some experience working and learning with people other than your family members.

This is also your last month of being six. As the youngest kid in the family, I think I imagine you as more of a baby than you really are. Seven sounds so much older than six, and that’s how old your eldest sibling was when you were born. That didn’t seem so tiny to me then, but as our household’s littlest member, you often get the baby treatment. Your dad jokingly said you should go back to five on this birthday instead of moving forward to seven. I expected you to say no way, since kids are usually excited to move to the next age, but you liked the idea. You look like a seven-year-old, with one front tooth missing and the other getting pretty wiggly. You have the vocabulary of someone older and the tender heart of your own sweet self.

Your current favorites: being fully vaccinated (technically not till tomorrow), Pokémon battles, comfy pants, Knoppers, playing the Mario Maker levels Artemis builds, meat in most forms, rainbow sherbet, the Mercy Watson books, weird YouTube videos of other people playing video games, and opening the daily flap on your Advent calendar.

You’re a treat, Callum. I am really going to miss watching you learn every day. I’ve seen you go from a nervous little kindergartner who was too shy to participate in class Zooms to a kid who is a bit overzealous with the Unmute button. You’ve learned to read, to do more complicated math, all kinds of science concepts, and how to use breakout rooms effectively. A lot of adults have a hard time with that. I know it will be good for you to do your learning away from me, but you’re going to do great. Even though I wish you could go back to being five, I know that a smart, wonderful seven-year-old is ready to emerge. You, my fully-vaccinated sweetheart, are going to kick some in-person first-grade butt.

Love,

Mommy