to my son on his sixth birthday

My dearest son,

I write to you on Day Eight of our self-imposed quarantine. This past week has been troublesome, as I have had to serve as your kindergarten teacher, as well as your mother. I now feel very strongly that we do not pay our teachers enough and that I am most certainly not cut out to be an elementary school instructor. Our food supply remains steady, as does our toilet paper, and our spirits are relatively high. We are in a celebratory mood as today marks the sixth year of your birth and we celebrated Flippy’s birthday on Friday.

Happy sixth birthday, Geebs! Some day we will look back on this birthday and remember how we spent it together in our house as a family as some scary stuff was happening in the world outside.

While your fifth year of life is closing in a strange way, the rest of the year has been pretty great. You graduated from Pre-K and started Kindergarten at York Academy in Mrs. Thoman’s & Mrs. Paul’s class.

To be honest, the school year started out a little rough but we rallied our resources and have an amazing support team to get you the help that you needed to rock your school year. You’re working with your TSS, Miss Dee, and while I don’t think you’ll ever be a kid who loves school (when you were in preschool you literally asked me, “How long do I have to do this?), I think it’s growing on you.

You’ve started spelling like crazy; you’re really good at it! You also continue to love art and are so creative.

Whenever anyone asks you if you want to be an artist when you grow up, you firmly correct them: “I already AM an artist.”

That creativity extends to your wardrobe (quite the fashionisto) and, sometimes unfortunately, your hairstyles, which you have taken to trying to cut yourself. I did actually like the mohawk though.

You went through a relatively creepy phase in the fall where you were obsessed with scary things, particularly It and PennyWISE (as you pronounce it).

This year, you’ve become more courageous and daring… and stronger! You’ve mastered the monkey bars. Flippy bought you a new scooter for your birthday and you can really zoom on that thing. You’re getting really good at swimming! And this past summer, you rode your first “real” roller coaster (not to mention Tower of Terror and Splash Mountain at Disney!)

You continue to love your superheroes, though this year you also expanded to love the Toy Story gang and more recently, Sonic. I’ve tried to explain that it is possible to like multiple things at once.

You’re a sweet, sensitive, precocious little scamp. After watching a lot of Home Alone this Christmas, you’ve started raising your eyebrows ala Kevin McCallister. You think it will get you out of trouble. It does not.

For your sixth birthday, you wanted a new loft bed (like the one Holdy has). So Happy Birthday, buddy. Big boy bed for a big boy, and lots of room for making art.