My sweet Tobin,

We’ve been through some ups and downs this month—more ups than downs, I think, but it’s been emotional in any case. First of all, you wrapped up your basketball season. You had a bit of a rough start, including some frustrations with teammates who weren’t doing things exactly the way you’d prefer, but it worked out. You ended up having a lot of fun and a successful season. At your level, the officials don’t keep score, but it’s usually pretty obvious which team played better. You had some talented players on your team, and I think you “won” all your games. The sweetest victory was the last one, when you played the team that two of your school friends are on. It was a friendly rivalry, but you were pretty happy about the outcome nonetheless.

The last week of your basketball season, the CDC changed its recommendations for mask usage, stating that they no longer recommended masking among people living in counties with low or moderate COVID rates. They also changed their definition of “low” and “moderate” to include data like access to hospitals and hospital bed availability. I feel that unfairly skewed the data, especially in a community like ours with a large hospital. Rates are far lower than they were during the winter’s omicron surge, thank goodness, but they’re still higher than they were last summer. Knowing that you could probably get a bed in a hospital if you needed one doesn’t, to me, justify the risk of our community dropping mask use. About half of your classmates have stopped wearing masks in school, including the friends on the basketball team you played that weekend. Basketball involves a lot of face-to-face interaction, and even though you’re good about wearing your mask, a single mask can only do so much.

After that first week of the school mask mandate being lifted, and just five days before our scheduled departure for our Florida Keys trip, you got a sore throat. I immediately administered a rapid COVID test on you. It was negative, which lowered my anxiety about ten percent, but I know false negatives are a possibility on those tests. We had you take a PCR test, but it was a Sunday and the lab was closed, so results took much longer to come back than they do on our typical Friday testing schedule. I didn’t want you to feel bad or guilty, and I praised you several times for being honest about your sore throat. Still, I was sick with worry. These family vacations mean so much to me. I’ve been waiting for two years for this trip. We’d been looking forward with so much excitement to our dolphin encounter, which we were supposed to do two years ago but canceled. I bought travel insurance that would allow us to get a refund and reschedule our trip if one of us got COVID, but I still would have been extremely sad if we’d had to miss our March trip.

After an excruciating couple of days of waiting, we got your negative PCR test (and another negative rapid antigen test at home in the interim). That was a huge relief. The trip was on, but I was still concerned about your health. Your sore throat evolved into a stuffy head and congested ears. The last time we went to the Keys, you were also getting over a cold (basketball seems to be the common denominator here), and it developed into an ear infection and a pretty miserable time for you. I took you to the doctor, who determined that you didn’t have an ear infection, but you had some impacted wax. She tried to dig it out in the office, but it was a very painful procedure, and she stopped because it was too hard on you. Instead, she suggested some OTC ear drops we could use to dissolve the wax. She also kindly put a note in your chart that, if you got a fever or ear pain or other signs of an ear infection, she would prescribe antibiotics long distance so we wouldn’t have to deal with finding a doctor in the Keys like last time.

The ear drops worked, along with flushing out your ears with warm water and a bulb syringe, and we got a whole lot of goop out of your ears. Your cold was almost better by the time we arrived and totally gone just a couple of days into the trip. Callum is the only other family member who got it, and I credit the protocols we put into place when we suspected COVID: everybody masking in common spaces, eating socially distanced from each other (you ate alone in your room until we got the test results, which you hated), running our air filter fan constantly, and lots of wiping down of doorknobs and faucets with disinfectant wipes.

Our travel down to the Keys was a mixed bag too. We drove to Chicago the night before our flight, which was fine. We all enjoyed our hotel room, including pizza delivery from a nearby joint and hotel waffles the next morning. Unfortunately, some bad weather in central Florida delayed our flight by about four hours. That was rough, because we were still being strict about masking. We ended up finding a quiet area at the airport (a miracle) and took some brief moments of masklessness to sip water and eat the snacks I’d packed. When we finally got on the plane, we were seated right in front of some jerky frat boys whose terrible mask usage was but one reason they were unpleasant to sit near.

Once we got to Miami, though, it was all smooth sailing. Your dad got our car rental upgraded to a luxurious Chrysler Pacifica minivan. About half an hour out of the city, we used a Wendy’s drive-through and agreed that it was the most delicious thing we’d ever eaten (even though they were out of ketchup). We didn’t get the beautiful views we’re used to seeing when we drive down during the day, but the traffic wasn’t bad, and we arrived at our condo without incident. Later, I found out we actually got pretty lucky. A lady I was chatting with in the pool said her friends were supposed to fly out of Chicago on Saturday just like us, but their flight got canceled entirely and they didn’t get down until Monday.

Everything else was wonderful. We did our dolphin encounter, which was so much fun. We owe great thanks to Nana, who gifted us this experience two years ago. It was so disappointing to cancel it then, but we made up for it with a very fun time this year. We got to do all kind of fun things, from petting the dolphins to kissing them to giving them signals. Most of the time, when a person gave a signal, one or sometimes two dolphins would respond and do the trick. When you gave the signal to have a splash fight, two of the dolphins immediately started splashing you, and a third swam up to join in. You also got to hold onto their dorsal fins while they took you on a ride in the water. Skitter asked if it was scary, and you said no. I didn’t think it was scary either. The dolphins seemed so happy and interested in us.

One good thing about the Dolphin Research Center is that all the dolphins are formerly injured ones who were rescued or ones who were born on the property. They haven’t been plucked from the sea for our entertainment. Also, none of them was required to play with us. Two of the dolphins at the station next to us weren’t into it, so they just left, and the trainers invited other ones over. I don’t know as much about dolphins as the researchers there, but it seemed obvious to me that the dolphins were curious and having fun. We attended a session about the research they’re doing into dolphin cognition, and we got to watch one dolphin teach other how to accomplish a task. It was a really special experience, and I’m so glad I got to share it with you, Tobin.

While I’m pretty confident that I’m the person in our family who gets most wound up about family vacations, you’re a close second, and I’m so glad it worked out for us to take this trip. We needed it. I will cherish the traditional Mom-Tobin morning beach walks as long as I live.

Your current favorites: NBA basketball, laundryball (a game you invented that makes me never know where your laundry basket has ended up), Goldfish crackers, pizza, approaching life’s challenges with joy and enthusiasm, the Spy School book series, playing online with your friends, and eating lunch at school. Before our trip, I was picking you up every day and bringing you home for lunch in an effort to protect our family from COVID exposure, but we’ve loosened our restrictions a little now. You seem really happy to be at school with your friends, even if it means a cold lunch. I’m not promising we won’t have to revert to our old, more restrictive practices, because who knows when a new variant will cause a new wave, but you’re enjoying it for now.

I will enjoy you forever, my precious Tobin.

Love,
Mom