My little monsters,

Parenting is simultaneously the most rewarding and frustrating journey I’ve ever embarked upon. I can see the insanity starting to bubble up around the house, hear the screams, I can feel it building, and I know where things are headed. Like Professor Trelawney in the Harry Potter books we’ve been reading, I feel like all too often I can predict the future. The current happy screams will be replaced by tears and shouting. Soon, there will be chaos.   

In many ways, the pandemonium in our house and neighborhood has reflected what’s been going on in the outside world. For the last 11 months, we’ve remained quarantined at home while Covid has killed nearly 500,000 people in the U.S alone. This summer also saw some of the largest protests over racial injustice in our country’s history after George Floyd, a black man, was killed at the hands of a white police officer. Then midsummer brought wildfires that decimated nearly 9 million acres of land on the West Coast and kept us indoors for a week due to poor air quality. Fall brought with it remote learning, a Presidential election, and what many have called an attempted revolution or insurrection in which the U.S. Capitol Building was overtaken. And through all of this, your Mom’s recovery continues to have its ups and downs, and you continue to be 6 and 8-year-old kids. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, everyone was quarantined. There was an eire calm to the neighborhood and we spent a lot of time going on long walks as a family. The two of you spent a great deal of time together playing in the yard and climbing trees. You eventually became friends with the kids on the block behind us as you, sitting up in the tree, discovered they had climbed up on the top of their swing set. So a friendship was born, chatting for hours at a time, up in a tree, across a fence.  

Eventually parents let their kids out or their houses and you had friends to play with. On just our one-city block, there are 13 kids that play together. Typically not all at once, but often the majority is present. For the first several months when you were allowed to play, groups of parents stood at the ready to constantly yell, “Six feet! Give them some space! Hey, everyone, give each other some room!” Eventually, since we’re all quarantining and largely working from home, we slapped some masks on you all and let you go nuts. Your Mom continually says the summer of 2020 will probably be remembered as the best summer of your lives. 

Sure, there was madness going on all around you, but as kids, you were largely unaffected by it all. You definitely had a lot of great questions about what was going on around you, and you’d ponder the answers to our questions, before quickly deciding it was time to run laps outside. To you, this summer was unique in that no one had to go to their usual summer camps while their parents were at work, since nothing was open due to Covid. Everyday, everyone was around. So starting at 7 or 8am, you’d jet from the house and be gone until we tracked you down for lunch, and then dinner. 

When school restarted, things got much tougher. To you, especially you, Arlo, school is just something preventing you from being outside playing all day. So we negotiate and fight to get you to sit down at the dining room table, and get you to stare at a screen for hours a day. Your poor Mom is stuck teaching kindergarten and second grade. In between call and work, I help out where I can, but this time has assured me that I did not miss my calling to become an elementary school teacher. 

In a sense, Arlo, you’re a much better student than any of your previous years because your issue in the classroom has always been your outbursts. You continue to interrupt and shout out one-liners aimed at cracking yourself up, but your teacher is spared the disruptions because you’re on mute. 

Elliott, your teacher claims you’re a model student, and I have no doubt your biggest hurdle to the end of remote-learning will be putting an end to your 11-month reign of wearing nothing but pajamas. Gone are the days of you only wearing dresses. For Christmas this year, we got you a lot of new clothes, all of which were pajamas. You still wake up and change, and change before bed most days, the only difference being you’re jumping from one set of PJs to another. 

Arlo, you’re still an incredibly funny, needy, combative, and sweet little man. 

You require constant interaction, confrontation, stimulation, assurance, and love, almost simultaneously. Most days, the world is against you, or at the very least, your Mom and I are, according to you. You’re completely exhausting, while still finding ways to make me crack up and melt my heart. 

This summer I walked up on you outside playing charades with a group of friends. One kid sat scrunched up on the ground in a tiny ball, head buried between his knees with his arms wrapped overtop as others guessed, “You’re a circle?” You’re a wheel!” “You’re a rock!” Then came your voice, towering above the others, as you stood up and pointed down at your crouched friend, “You’re totally ashamed of yourself!”  

Other times you follow me around the house, tagging me with the jab-cross combination your Mom taught you, trying to goad me into a wrestling match where you’ll team up with your sister. She’s most often on the attack, screaming, “You can’t stop the MINNOWS!” as she charges me over and over, only to get pummeled with a pillow or body slammed to my mattress. You run around the perimeter of the room, waiting for me to get distracted with Elliott before you try to attack, yelling, “Get WRECKED!”

“Get wrecked? Where did that come from?” I asked. You looked at me like I was a sad little man, responding, “It’s something people say!” No doubt it’s the first of many looks I’ll receive when questioning new catch phrases you’re trying out. 

In the fall, Elliott asked for a fish tank for her birthday and I asked if I could borrow a fish from your tank to place into Elliott’s. You strongly objected, you don’t really love sharing your stuff. Your stuff, is your stuff. I explained that I just needed the fish for a few days so it would poop and pee in the water, and help set the water quality so we could add more fish. 

“You can’t borrow one of my fish,” you responded, totally dead-pan, “But Dad, it would be my honor to poop and pee in Elliott’s fish tank, but I don’t think her fish would like it very much.” And to that, you unleashed a hysterical laugh, almost as proud of yourself for your comedic delivery and timing as I was. 

You’ve also been hanging out with a lot of older kids in the neighborhood and picking up words and phrases from them, which is always fun. One day after sinking a shot while playing basketball with me you did a little dance and said, “Oh yeah, ahhh right, I’m so sexy!” I asked if you knew what the word sexy ment. You responded that you thought it meant you were a cool person. 

“No,” I said, “It means you think the person is really good looking and you want to kiss them.”

You blushed and let loose an awkward giggle, and muttered, “Oh shit…”

Ms Elliott Mae, my baby girl. You are every bit as sweet and thoughtful as ever, but you’re not void of your own fits. Where your brother’s meltdowns are directed at us, yours are directed at yourself for being totally exhausted. You’ll break down into tears, melt into the floor and sob, “I’m so tired.”

You’ve entered a new stage of playing with a group of new lady friends in the neighborhood. Now instead of just chasing the boys around by yourself, you’re running with a crew of girls. Most days you’re all on our porch and I hear you going in and out, grabbing different toys for all of you to play with. Then in, and out. Then in again. Then out. Then back in… “This is the last time, I swear Dad,” you’ll call out, only to hear the door open and close five more times in the following two minutes. It drives me mad. 

You’re also continuing to be very musical. Unlike your big brother, you cherish a bit of alone time, and I often sneak up on you as you’re playing by yourself to hear you singing as you play. It’s a trait you’ve picked up from me, narrating your play and every waking moment of your life through made up songs. You’re constantly singing, and dancing, and humming. 

Your other love of your life is shows. You LOVE to watch shows, laying on a heating vent or in front of the fire, or in your pitch black room, under the covers, with an iPad an inch away from your face. You’ve found a series of shows you adore that have an incredibly sarcastic and dry humor to them, and it’s completely rubbing off on you. You’re filled with hilarious one-liners and sarcastic quips.

Around the New Year I listened to you recite your New Year’s Resolutions, all of which sounded more like a wish list than anything else. “For my Resolutions I’m going to go to the twisty-slide pool a lot once Covid is over.”

You continue to be a super fussy eater and now that you’re outside playing all day, you’re completely run down by the time we eat dinner. The other night, out of nowhere you started crying at the table, “I like having people read to me because I’m not the best reader. I don’t know big words!” You melted into a pile of tears. But you are already a great reader, I’m so surprised how eager you are to learn.  

It’s shocking to me how quickly you’re both growing up. While you spend hours at a time outside playing with your friends, this quarantine has given us a lot of quality family time we probably otherwise would not have gotten. We’ve spent countless hours together playing Settlers of Catan, playing guitar and singing, building Lego, or baking with your Mom. It’s simultaneously wonderful and the cause of me losing my mind from time to time. It’s so hard because a lot of times you’re just having fun, being kids, but we’re stuck inside because of forest fires and Covid, and the endless hours of screaming leads to us getting super frustrated and it becomes too much, and we yell, and then we feel shitty about it…

But now we’re finding new hobbies and ways to relate. You’re both interested in learning to play chess and I find myself continually teaching you the trait I’m trying to unlearn — to always be thinking two steps ahead, to constantly analyze the what ifs. What if you move here, and I move there? What then? Or if you don’t move there, but I move here? What then? It’s the single biggest hurdle I struggle to overcome as a parent, to not think about what comes next, or where your current actions will lead. 

Recently I tried this with you both. You were playing together, pretending you couldn’t touch the floor and jumping from one couch to the other. I saw where it was headed. I didn’t know exactly where, but I knew no good could come of it, but I struggled to contain myself and let you just be kids. You didn’t fall and get hurt, or burst into tears, instead, the inertia from your jump propelled the couch against the wall, crumbling the lath and plaster into a nice small hole… Check. Mate. 

Always being able to see the future and predict what’s going to happen next definitely affects my behavior in the moment and causes me to struggle with being present. I’m working on it, because I can read the tea leaves, and I know, that at this rate, you’ll soon be all grown up, our house will be quiet and free from chaos, and I… I will miss it. I will miss you, my little monsters… 

I love you so much! 

Love,
Dad

2-19-21