Happy 16th birthday, my darling!

Your birthday was the last day of winter break, and we celebrated with your favorite home-cooked dinner the previous night (linguine with homemade tomato sauce) and your favorite take-out (Panda Express) and ice cream cake on the actual day. You also enjoyed some presents and general goofing around. It’s a crummy time of year to have a party, especially considering the weather challenges we’ve had lately, but you got together with friends a couple of times during the break. Maybe when things warm up you can do something more organized.

You only went to school two days this week, because we had a couple of big weather events. The first storm came on the afternoon of your first day back to school following break. It dumped fifteen inches of snow on our area, which I learned is the largest accumulation of snow this county has had since 1973. You had two days off after that happened. Once that passed, you went to school one day. The following day, there was another storm, and you got Friday off school, which makes it a four-day weekend since Monday is Martin Luther King day. Now the temperatures have plummeted, and I wouldn’t be shocked if the four-day weekend morphed into a five-day weekend. So far you and your brothers seem to be enjoying the time off, but I think at some point you’ll feel ready to get back into your routine. January is always the month with the most weather challenges, and it seems to have all happened in a one-week span this year. Hopefully we’re almost past the worst of it and you’ll be able to get back to learning and socializing.

You’re not quite ready to get your driver’s license yet. You’ve completed Driver’s Ed and the written portion of your driving test, but you still need to wait until April until a full year has elapsed with your permit, and you need to take the driving test as well. You definitely need some more practice between now and then; we haven’t done enough this winter, and right now it’s dangerous even for an experienced driver. You don’t seem to have a lot of urge to get your license. I think that’s a generational difference. Many of your friends aren’t in a big hurry to either. Maybe it’s because we have pretty good public transportation around here, and we living within walking distance of your school. Either way, you’re not chomping at the bit. It would still be a good accomplishment, and once the streets are more passable, we’ll have to get out there and get more practice hours in before you take the final step.

We enjoyed some nice holiday togetherness with family, including a trip to Albia to see your dad’s family and a trip to Ames to see mine. The scarf in the photo above is actually a pair of pants, but you look cute in them either way. It was a pretty relaxing break, with nothing too wild happening. The whole family had to pitch in on the snow-removal effort, so you helped with that, with only minimal grumbling. It’s too cold to leave the house now, even with your jaunty scarf, so we’re all just hunkering down.

I really enjoy your company. You’re a good sport about hanging around for a while during family cocktail hour and at meals, and you always have something funny or interesting to say. You got the go-ahead at your most recent orthpaedics appointment to only wear your brace during sleeping hours. That’s been a nice lifestyle upgrade for you, since I don’t think it’s very comfortable. You’re almost done growing (which is good for our family shoe budget), and it means that your back is probably at or very near its final position. While it will never be completely straight, it’s close enough that you don’t have any activity restrictions, and it’s certainly not visibly noticeable. I’m glad you never needed to wear it to school, and I’m very glad that you did such a good job wearing it for the prescribed hours over the last few years.

Before break, you had a band concert, which Mubby and Skitter attended. It was impressive as usual; you and your fellow musicians do a great job. Right now, concert band and jazz band are your only school activities. I wish you’d get excited about something else, and you don’t even have the best attitude about music these days. I’m not sure what it will take to get you motivated about a particular area of study or recreation, but it seems like you need to get a fire lit under you somehow. Right now it seems like your level of enthusiasm is pretty low all around. You seem cheerful enough; you always make us laugh at the dinner table, and you have been watching a lot of movies and getting interested in film.

I’ve been looking around for summer camps or class that would let you do hands-on filmmaking, but I haven’t found anything yet. You attended the Filmscene animation camp many times and the miniatures camp once, and you liked them a lot, but you feel like you’ve gotten all you can get out of them. I reached out to the Filmscene people to see if they were running any more advanced filmmaking camps, but they’re not for the time being. I’ll keep looking around. Your dad wants you to get a job this summer, which is not out of the question, but I’d be just has happy if you were engaged in some kind of learning and/or artistic experience.

Your current favorites: sleeping in late on all these snow days, playing Minecraft, watching movies, watching the show Lupin with your dad, pasta, Honey Nut Cheerios, Goldfish crackers, making us laugh with your witticisms, getting good grades, and being a great kid.

I love you so much, my dear Artemis. Sixteen will bring new challenges and new joys, and I’m so glad to share them with you.

Love,

Mom