Dear Tobin,

I’m writing this as we wind down from Christmas 2021, which has been a quiet affair but a nice one. You were really excited about the holidays this year, counting down the days, shaking presents, and helping bake cookies. You’re always an enthusiastic person, but this year I found your spirit to be especially inspiring. I felt more in a holiday mood than usual, too. It’s been fun to see you go above your usual levels of excitement, which are pretty high already.

You got some good presents, had fun picking out items for your annual draw-a-sibling’s-name gift exchange, and writing a note to go with Santa’s milk and cookies. You enjoyed eating plenty of milk and cookies, too.

Your strongest interest right now is the NBA. You’ve been watching a lot of basketball with your dad, and a challenge you’ve set for yourself is to be able to list all 30 NBA teams. You can usually do it when you write them down. You have your favorite teams and favorite players, and you’re always trying to engage other family members in NBA talk. Your dad likes basketball but generally pays more attention to college teams than NBA, so you sometimes find yourself frustrated. I try to chime in sometimes, but I’m no help—I can never remember that the Washington Wizards are from D.C., not the state. Over the holiday, you were telling Uncle Joe about your strategies for listing out all the teams, and he was impressed by the different techniques you use. You have categories, such as teams with animal names, teams from states with multiple teams, and teams with fire-related names. I could only think of the Phoenix Suns for that one, but you say the Miami Heat also count. I don’t know if there are any others.

It’s long been part of your nature to get obsessed with an idea for a relatively short amount of time, so it will be interesting to see how long this phase lasts. After taking last year off, I signed you up for parks and rec basketball starting later in January. You’re fully vaccinated now, and you’ll be heading back to school in-person after winter break. I’m not completely comfortable with it, given the extremely high transmissibility of the omicron variant, but everyone in our family is now as vaccinated and boosted as allowed by the FDA. Fortunately, omicron appears not to be too serious in vaccinated people who still get it. We will continue to take advantage of the handy Test Iowa program for regular screening and definitely before visiting with older family members.

What’s slightly trickier is planning our upcoming travel. Our every-other-year trip to the Florida Keys is scheduled to happen in March, and we’ve already rented our condo. Despite much higher levels of cases worldwide this time as compared to two years ago, I’m still pretty comfortable going. We have tools now: vaccines, KF94 masks, and access to a direct flight from Chicago to Miami. The Keys also offers a lot of outdoor activities, so even if we need to limit our recreation, we should still have plenty we can safely do. We skipped our dolphin swim last time, and that was something you were really hoping to do. I think we can make it happen this time around. I did buy travel insurance that allows for cancellation to due COVID, so if someone in our family has the bad luck of coming down with it close to departure time, we can reschedule for the summer. I’ve promised you we’ll go one way or another. Some of my most wonderful memories are of the early morning beach walks you and I take together, and I know we’ll find a way to do it.

You’re really excited to start school again. You were disappointed to learn that you won’t be in the same class as your best friend, but you did a Zoom with your new class, and that got you pumped up. You said the teacher seems nice, that some of your other friends are in the class, and that they get to do some fun things. I’m really grateful for how well you’ve handled online learning up until this point, and I’m also so glad that you’re going back. It’s not great for my anxiety levels, but there’s more to your development than keeping me comfortable all the time. I know you’ll miss some of the friends you made through online school, but chances are you’ll see them again when junior high time comes. That will be sooner than I care to consider.

It will also be good for you to have more direct interaction with your peers. While you mostly get along well with your siblings, you have the fieriest personality in our family. We have to assign your spot at the dining room table thoughtfully, because you tend to spar with whichever sibling is closest. You are usually very sweet to Callum, but you can wind each other up to the degree that it becomes a lot for the other diners to handle. Artemis is witty and sends a lot of zingers your way. You’re witty too, but you’re also three-and-a-half years younger, so it frustrates you when you can’t keep up. Usually both of you laugh through it, but sometimes the banter gets so barbed that I can’t handle it. That’s something you’ll need to remember in school: not everyone can laugh off an insult like you, and not everyone is prepared to engage in the battles of wits that you and Art enjoy. Going back to school will give you some valuable experience in learning the nuances of other people’s personalities.

Your current favorites: the NBA, playing online and outside with your friend Kit, pizza, audiobooks and traditional books (especially those written by Stuart Gibbs), your bass lessons, mashing together vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup, and watching the show Psych with your dad.

I’m very proud of you, Tobin, for making it through some big challenges over the last nearly two years. More challenges are to come, of course, but I look forward to facing them with you. You add joy and vigor to any room you enter, and it’s been a privilege to spend so much time in rooms with you.

Love,

Mom